GLOBAL warming isn’t a prediction. It is happening. That is why I was so troubled to read a recent interview with President Obama in Rolling Stone [ http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/04/i-have-the-utmost-respect-for.html ] in which he said that Canada would exploit the oil in its vast tar sands reserves “regardless of what we do.”
If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate.
Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now. That level of heat-trapping gases would assure that the disintegration of the ice sheets would accelerate out of control. Sea levels would rise and destroy coastal cities. Global temperatures would become intolerable. Twenty to 50 percent of the planet’s species would be driven to extinction. Civilization would be at risk.
That is the long-term outlook. But near-term, things will be bad enough. Over the next several decades, the Western United States and the semi-arid region from North Dakota to Texas will develop semi-permanent drought, with rain, when it does come, occurring in extreme events with heavy flooding. Economic losses would be incalculable. More and more of the Midwest would be a dust bowl. California’s Central Valley could no longer be irrigated. Food prices would rise to unprecedented levels.
If this sounds apocalyptic, it is. This is why we need to reduce emissions dramatically. President Obama has the power not only to deny tar sands oil additional access to Gulf Coast refining, which Canada desires in part for export markets, but also to encourage economic incentives to leave tar sands and other dirty fuels in the ground.
The global warming signal is now louder than the noise of random weather, as I predicted would happen by now in the journal Science in 1981. Extremely hot summers have increased noticeably. We can say with high confidence that the recent heat waves in Texas and Russia, and the one in Europe in 2003, which killed tens of thousands, were not natural events — they were caused by human-induced climate change.
We have known since the 1800s that carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere. The right amount keeps the climate conducive to human life. But add too much, as we are doing now, and temperatures will inevitably rise too high. This is not the result of natural variability, as some argue. The earth is currently in the part of its long-term orbit cycle where temperatures would normally be cooling. But they are rising — and it’s because we are forcing them higher with fossil fuel emissions.
The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen from 280 parts per million to 393 p.p.m. over the last 150 years. The tar sands contain enough carbon — 240 gigatons — to add 120 p.p.m. Tar shale, a close cousin of tar sands found mainly in the United States, contains at least an additional 300 gigatons of carbon. If we turn to these dirtiest of fuels, instead of finding ways to phase out our addiction to fossil fuels, there is no hope of keeping carbon concentrations below 500 p.p.m. — a level that would, as earth’s history shows, leave our children a climate system that is out of their control.
We need to start reducing emissions significantly, not create new ways to increase them. We should impose a gradually rising carbon fee, collected from fossil fuel companies, then distribute 100 percent of the collections to all Americans on a per-capita basis every month. The government would not get a penny. This market-based approach would stimulate innovation, jobs and economic growth, avoid enlarging government or having it pick winners or losers. Most Americans, except the heaviest energy users, would get more back than they paid in increased prices. Not only that, the reduction in oil use resulting from the carbon price would be nearly six times as great as the oil supply from the proposed pipeline from Canada, rendering the pipeline superfluous, according to economic models driven by a slowly rising carbon price.
But instead of placing a rising fee on carbon emissions to make fossil fuels pay their true costs, leveling the energy playing field, the world’s governments are forcing the public to subsidize fossil fuels with hundreds of billions of dollars per year. This encourages a frantic stampede to extract every fossil fuel through mountaintop removal, longwall mining, hydraulic fracturing, tar sands and tar shale extraction, and deep ocean and Arctic drilling.
President Obama speaks of a “planet in peril,” but he does not provide the leadership needed to change the world’s course. Our leaders must speak candidly to the public — which yearns for open, honest discussion — explaining that our continued technological leadership and economic well-being demand a reasoned change of our energy course. History has shown that the American public can rise to the challenge, but leadership is essential.
The science of the situation is clear — it’s time for the politics to follow. This is a plan that can unify conservatives and liberals, environmentalists and business. Every major national science academy in the world has reported that global warming is real, caused mostly by humans, and requires urgent action. The cost of acting goes far higher the longer we wait — we can’t wait any longer to avoid the worst and be judged immoral by coming generations.
James Hansen directs the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and is the author of “Storms of My Grandchildren.”
In ocean systems rogue waves draw and accumulate their energy from smaller waves (Source: Gregory Balkin/iStockphoto)
Dani Cooper ABC Thursday, 14 June 2012
Studies in the laboratory involving pulsing lasers could lead to a warning system that will alert ships to the imminent approach of a devastating freak wave.
The research led by Professor Nail Akhmediev from the Australian National University's Research School of Physics and Engineering [ http://physics.anu.edu.au/ ], in collaboration with French and Spanish researchers is published in the latest Physical Review Letters [ http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v108/i23/e233901 ].
According to Akhmediev their work uses lasers to replicate waves of extreme amplitude, also known as freak or rogue waves, and shows these waves are more common than thought.
Freak waves are steep waves that can appear to come out of nowhere. They can be hundreds of metres long and can be two to three times higher than the surrounding waves at the time.
At one time they were considered to be a myth, however in 2001 satellites captured more than 10 giant waves more than 25 metres high during three weeks of data collection.
While rogue waves, have been studied for the past decade, this latest study demonstrates a new mechanism for creating the waves in a laboratory setting.
"A crucial factor in the appearance of extreme events, whether in nature, or a laser in the laboratory, is the existence of energy, or a background excitation in the system. This is a basic feature of so-called dissipative systems," says Akhmediev.
Accumulate energy
In ocean systems rogue waves draw and accumulate their energy from smaller waves.
He says optical lasers are a classic example of a dissipative system and similar extreme events can also be created within laser systems by replicating the "chaotic processes" in the sea.
This is done by varying the amplitude, intervals and length, of the laser pulses. Measuring equipment then recorded the peak pulses - the laser system's equivalent of a rogue wave.
"What we've found is ... that extreme events happen much more often than people expect," he says.
Akhmediev says the research has also helped pinpoint features that indicate a rogue wave is building.
By creating systems that can detect these "features" it would be possible to develop an early warning system for ships to alert them that a rogue wave was on the horizon.
While the system has so far only been used to analyse rogue waves, Akhmediev believes it can also help in better understanding other extreme events such as bushfire, floods and cyclones.
"We are trying to expand this knowledge to look at other systems," says Akhmediev.
By RACHEL NUWER - November 8, 2012, 2:00 pm1 Comment
Correction Appended [ all emphasis mine ]
Josh Haner/The New York Times
To bypass the challenges of predicting how clouds will change, scientists used relative humidity as a stand-in of sorts.
While scientists express confidence that the earth will continue to warm in response to an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, fine-tuning those projections has been a challenge. The majority of estimates fall between a rise of 2 to 4.5 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees to 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit), which leaves quite a wide range of uncertainty.
While the numbers may seem relatively trivial to the layman, they represent a vast range of potential impacts on society in terms of sea-level rise, heat waves and extreme weather.
A new paper .. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/338/6108/792.abstract .. in Friday’s issue of the journal Science adds to that discussion, suggesting that future warming may fall on the high side of climate projections.
“There’s been a lot of uncertainty and quite a range of this quantity called climate sensitivity in the climate models,” said one of the authors, Kevin Trenberth .. http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/trenbert.html , a senior scientist in the climate analysis section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research .. http://ncar.ucar.edu/ .. in Boulder, Colo. “If you take our results at face value, it certainly indicates that the climate change will be at the higher side of what’s been put forth previously, and that’s not good news.”
To arrive at that conclusion, Dr. Trenberth and his co-author, John Fasullo .. http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Staff/Fasullo/index.html , set out to assess which of 16 leading climate models most accurately portrayed the earth’s current climate, especially in regard to clouds.
To get around that challenge, the researchers focused on the relationship between relative humidity — a measure of moisture in the atmosphere — and clouds. A strong, observable relationship exists between the two: when relative humidity is high, condensation occurs and clouds form. Models, or computer projections of future climate trends, can indirectly represent clouds by taking into account relative humidity measurements, which are readily available and bypass much of the complexity that bogs down cloud dynamics.
The authors compared how well the current climate models that they reproduced observed satellite data of relative humidity in the tropics and subtropics, where monsoon seasons result in annual cycles of cloudy and clear skies. The models that best represented the real-world monsoon processes, they found, tended to be those situated on the higher end of the projections of warming.
This result suggests that relative humidity is a necessary metric for models to perform accurately, Dr. Trenberth said, but not a sufficient criterion in itself for predicting the degree of future change.
Like a grading system, researchers could use this new finding to assess how closely existing models reflect reality. “The results we found do not guarantee that the more sensitive models are correct,” he said. “But we now know that those less sensitive models are certainly not correct.”
While the study does not yield a new estimate of future warming, it adds another brick to the edifice of mainstream climate science. “This is a really interesting and provocative idea, which may well be right, but time will tell if this is really a key breakthrough,” said Andrew Dessler .. http://atmo.tamu.edu/profile/ADessler , a climate scientist at Texas A&M University who was not involved in the work.
“Science papers are frequently like cooking chili [ .. YUM! .. ] — you don’t really know how it’ll turn out until you put it in the fridge for a day or two,” he said.
Raymond Pierrehumbert .. http://news.uchicago.edu/profile/raymond-t-pierrehumbert , the Louis Block Professor in geophysical science at the University of Chicago, described the paper as “another useful data point on the spectrum of estimates of cloud sensitivity,” though not “an absolute game changer.”
He pointed out, for example, that the correlation between water vapor and clouds was drawn from short-term seasonal fluctuations. Researchers cannot be certain that those same correlations would hold true in response to a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the future, Dr. Pierrehumbert added.
“The whole problem is really the nature of the observations,” he said. “We don’t have long enough satellite records of cloud observations to really do this kind of study by directly looking at which models get the low clouds right, so we try to indirectly run around the inadequacies of the satellite record.”
Dr. Trenberth worries that observations of earth from space will only become more scarce .. http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/02/lights-out-for-research-satellites/ .. in the future as financing for satellite programs falls short, impeding future research that could help refine climate change predictions.
Regardless of scientists’ ability to accurately predict the extent of future changes, Dr. Pierrehumbert pointed out that the planet was not helpless. “The only way to guard ourselves against the risk of really strong climate change is just to emit less CO2, because the one thing we know for sure is the less we emit, the less the maximum climate change is going to be,” he said.
Evidence of the human influence on climate is with us already, Dr. Trenberth noted, in terms of a general trend of more severe storms, extreme droughts, heat waves and wildfires.
“What our study suggests is that, yes, we should pay special attention to these early signs, because as we go further into the future, the effects are apt to be even bigger still,” he said.
Correction: November 8, 2012
An earlier version of this post misstated the effect of the study because of a missing word. The sentence should read: "While the study does NOT yield a new estimate of future warming, it adds another brick to the edifice of mainstream climate science."
Assuming that the paper withstands scrutiny, it suggests that a global warming of about 1 degree Fahrenheit over the past half century has been enough to intensify the water cycle by about 4 percent. That led Dr. Durack to project a possible intensification of about 20 percent as the planet warms by several degrees in the coming century. That would be approximately twice the amplification shown by the computer programs used to project the climate, according to Dr. Durack’s calculations. Those programs are often criticized by climate-change skeptics who contend that they overestimate future changes, but Dr. Durack’s paper is the latest of several indications that the estimates may actually be conservative.
The new paper confirms a long-expected pattern for the ocean that also seems to apply over land: areas with a lot of rainfall in today’s climate are expected to become wetter, whereas dry areas are expected to become drier."
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