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The Great Plains of the United States, late twenty-first century: breadbasket or dust bowl?
It may depend on groundwater storage, finds a study published in Nature Geoscience this week (subscription required). The results are based on an unusually sophisticated watershed model that connects the below-ground water sources, surface water and the land surface itself.
If carbon dioxide is trump, then methane is the joker in the greenhouse game. The flammable gas (CH4) is produced in wetlands, landfills and in the guts of cattle and sheep, and it is stored in vast amounts in so-called clathrates, or gas hydrates, in the ocean floor.
The latter stuff has always kindled imagination. In the 1930s, dumbfounded Russian sailors who had lit dynamite for navigational purposes in the Siberian Arctic reported that the air around them started to burn. Had they set on fire methane released from clathrate reservoirs? Perhaps.
Less likely is that methane bubbling up from the ocean floor can makes the water so foamy that ships floating above sink like a rock. File this under Bermuda triangle myths.
But catastrophic methane bursts do seem to be linked with anomalous warming episodes in the Earth’s past, such as the one that occurred at the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum around 55 million years ago. Dissociating clathrates may well have been the culprit then.
What had uncorked the bottle is unclear. But in any case, reports this week of methane emissions from sub-sea permafrost beneath the Siberian shelf, and from the seabed off Svalbard, sound alarming.
Geologists assume there are large methane hydrate reservoirs in both regions. Are they beginning to destabilize? Have we lit a time bomb? Is global warning getting out of control?
Media reports this week imply all this, some more and some less cautiously. It’s a wonderful story of course: Weird things happening in the Arctic, strange tales from the bottom of the ocean, Apocalypse Soon! It’s new, it’s exciting, it’s scary - no wonder journalists love it.
But wait a minute. The methane system discovered off Svalbard has probably been active for thousands of years, it’s only that no-one has ever looked for it.
The methane emissions detected in the Laptev Sea are also not a new phenomenon. Russian scientists have observed methane plumes there since the mid-1990s when they began to regularly visit the remote and inaccessible region. It does seem that there are many more, and possibly more vigorous, emission hotspots than was previously thought. But observations are still few; it’s not too much of a surprise that the harder they look the more they will find. I have tried to put the recent discoveries in context in my news story here.
That’s not to say that rising methane emissions, and thawing permafrost, are no concerns. They are, and their sources and causes need to be studied carefully. Long-overlooked methane emissions from living plants, as were just recently confirmed, are proof enough for how poorly methane cycles are actually understood.
But not only in matters climate change there’s a danger of confusing people by media coverage that alternates between alarmism and appeasement. Andrew Revkin of the New York Times has appositely termed the effect a journalistic whiplash for the public.
Science, although intrinsically a never-ending process, will every so often generate journalistic scoops - and sometimes journalistic kitsch. The methane story is exciting, but inflationary use of ‘dramatic’, 'alarming' etc in science stories produces only cheap thrills.
Quirin Schiermeier
Cross-posted from Heliophage
Mark Lynas, whose Six Degrees (Amazon UK | US) has been a great success, had a piece in the New Statesman last week about nuclear power. It was a pretty standard, pretty well executed I'm-a-green-who's-much-more-freaked-out-about-climate-than-about-nukes piece, much in the long travelled Lovelock vein, not that unlike some things George Monbiot has recently been writing. As such it obviously got up the noses of some greens. I thought it was pretty sensible, myself; but there's a depressing kicker.
I wrote here yesterday that ‘I don’t think that anyone knows for sure how close we are to reaching tipping points in the climate system’. As it so happens, a pair of articles published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week illustrates this point nicely.
The first is a Perspective by atmospheric scientist V Ramanathan and postdoctoral researcher Yan Feng from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, who argue that the Earth is now committed to a 2.4°C rise in temperature above pre-industrial levels.
Anything above a 2°C increase is generally considered to be ‘dangerous’ climate change and would likely trigger several of the Earth’s tipping points, such as the complete loss of Arctic summer sea ice and melting of the Greenland ice sheet. And according to the IPCC, a rise in global temperature by 1-3°C will commit the planet to widespread loss of biodiversity, widespread deglaciation of the Greenland Ice Sheet, and a major reduction of area and volume of Hindu-Kush-Himalaya-Tibetan glaciers, which provide the head-waters for most major river systems of Asia.
The authors argue that for atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations to remain constant at 2005 levels for the rest of the century, aggressive emissions reductions would be required – yet emissions are rising.
Currently, the warming effect of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is being masked by the cooling effect of other air pollutants – such as smoke from cooking and agricultural waste burning – that create a dimming effect at the Earth’s surface.
Assuming policies to reduce these air pollutants are successful, the full warming potential of greenhouse gases will soon be realized. So as air pollution measures become effective (and much headway is being made here), the need for reducing carbon dioxide emissions becomes even more urgent, say Ramanathan and Feng.
Cross posted from The Great Beyond
The latest global carbon budget numbers are just out, and they make interesting, if slightly depressing, reading. (Global Carbon Project site – will be updated at midnight)
Most striking is that, despite years of effort, carbon dioxide emissions are increasing at an alarming rate of 3.5% a year– faster than the 2.7% predicted by the IPCC in their worst case scenario, and miles ahead of the 0.9% annual rise in the 1990s. Worst still, current measures have been based on a middle-ground IPCC scenario. Pep Candell from the Global Carbon Budget told me that this was “astonishing”.
For the first time, we have hit 10 billion tonnes of carbon emitted annually.
The other thing to note is that China and India are galumphing their way up the table of biggest carbon dioxide emitters. Ten years ago the top four were: USA, China, Russia, Japan. Today that list reads: China, USA, Russia, India – and I am assured by Candell that next year India will have jumped into third place.
This is a worry – when the Kyoto Protocol was first talked about, the countries of the developing developed world were overwhelmingly the highest emitters of CO2. But in the meantime, whilst decisions were made, details argued out and paperwork signed, the developing world has taken pole position.
China has, since 2002, jumped from being responsible for 14% of the global carbon dioxide emissions, to 21%. At the same time the US has been hovering at around 20%.
Slightly good news is that our natural saviours - the oceans, forests and soil, are still doing a sterling job. In 1959, natural sinks removed just over 50% of the carbon dioxide man emitted. And today, they do the same - gobble up just over half. The efficiency of these natural sinks has dropped by about 5% in the intervening years, which isn't ideal, but means that the overall news is not disastrous.
Response to the news – which will be officially announced tomorrow – from the media is widespread. It’s a ‘reality check’ according to the Daily Green; Zee News runs with the rise of India in the emission charts; while other reports tell it like it is: carbon dioxide emissions still rising.
Katharine Sanderson
A little something for those who find the escalating financial crisis overshadowing the somewhat less imminent threat of climate change. Check out this new 10-minute animation on climate tipping points by Plane Stupid activist Leo Murray, entitled ‘Wake up, freak out – then get a grip’.
It may be animation, but light entertainment it isn’t. Imaginatively illustrated and extensively referenced, this short piece by Murray, who narrates the story as an animated stick figure, takes us through a worst-case scenario of future climate change – from mass species extinctions all the way to famine and war.
It’s worth seeing for the opening scene alone, where a violin-playing polar bear is confronted by an incensed (stick figure) Murray, declaring:
This really isn’t about polar bears anymore.
I particularly like his representation of positive feedback loops as cogs in a machine. The science is solid for the most part, but selective - six degrees of warming is an upper estimate after all, and in truth I don’t think that anyone knows for sure how close we are to reaching tipping points in the climate system. I’m also unconvinced that beyond 6 degrees of warming the Earth will become the domain of flies, cockroaches and rats – isn’t that more of a nuclear winter scenario?
But Murray’s animation does a great job of bringing to life the concept of catastrophic climate change, with a defiant take home message to boot:
It is now very clear that in order to actually win the fight against climate change, making big changes to the way we each live our own lives is not going to be enough; we’re also going to have to actively confront powerful vested interests who will stop at nothing to prevent the changes we need from taking place. We have to be more than just consumers.
It looks like he’ll get Al Gore’s support on that one.
Olive Heffernan
When Nature (subscription) looked over the whole portfolio of carbon-free electricity options last month, it left wave power for last. In contrast to mature technologies like hydropower and up-and-coming ones like solar, most ideas for capturing the energy of pounding surf “remain firmly in the testing phase”, they wrote.
One project moving out of that phase involves three ‘wave snakes’ that the company Pelamis has just installed off the coast of Portugal - long, cherry-red tubes that wiggle in the waves and use the motion to drive generators, whose electricity passes onto the Portuguese grid. This video hosted by the Guardian shows how they work (and couples soothing music to the animated undulation - I may save the link for next time I’m up at night worrying about the energy crisis).
This week on Nature Reports Climate Change, we have a series of news features on the US elections, looking at where the presidential candidates stand on energy and climate. We submitted questions to both campaigns on the key issues - such as whether the US should accept international binding targets before China and India to how they would balance tapping domestic oil reserves with reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Obama replied to our request with unique answers, but the McCain campaign declined to respond. McCain's stance on the issues is taken from the information on the Republican platform. The full Q&A with the candidates is here.
Reporter Amanda Leigh Haag also takes also looks at how the presidential candidates – and their running mates – have fared on climate and energy policy to date, and on the challenges that the newly inaugurated president will likely face in pushing legislation through Congress.
What is clear is that whoever wins the White House will face a daunting list of challenges in making climate change a priority on both the home front, and internationally. Not least of these will be the short lead in time to negotiating a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, while facing pressure to push federal legislation through Congress.
And for a look at how some of the broader issues in science are playing out in the presidential campaigns, there’s a whole special issue of Nature [subscription] dedicated to the US election. The package includes features on how John McCain and Barack Obama developed their stances on science; where they might take the country if elected, and how the next president could bring radical shifts to America's major research entities. Columnist David Goldston challenges the accepted wisdom about the role of the presidential science adviser, and a Books & Arts special asks eminent academics which science book the next US president should read. Also available to download is a series of podcasts on science issues in the elections.
Olive Heffernan
Cross-posted from Heliophage
Commuting in this morning on the boat, I was struck by a Guardian article on a new McKinsey report (pdf) about carbon capture and storage:
The study shows that such plants could be economically viable by 2030 at the latest. But it would require substantial public subsidies to get 10-12 plants running by the EU target date of 2015...McKinsey said that, with coal still likely to make up 60% of EU power generation by 2030, CCS could be a vital solution to ensuring security of energy supply and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It could reduce emissions by 400m tonnes a year by 2030, or a fifth of planned European savings. The consultants' report, published yesterday, showed that with an aggressive commercial push from the middle of the next decade, CCS costs could come down from as much as €90 for a tonne of CO2 initially, to about €30-45 in 2030 - or in line with expected carbon prices then.
But of course we can't; not now. Spending $700 billion + on bailing out banks is going to make the US, at least, less able to spend comparatively small amounts on other things. As my old boss Bill Emmott but it, also in the Guardian:
The true impact of this expansion of public spending lies in politics, and in what this rescue will now make more difficult or perhaps impossible: the expansion of other areas of public spending, such as healthcare or public programmes for alternative energy. If Barack Obama is elected president in November, he will find his fiscal hands tied a lot tighter than he may have hoped, even with a Democratic Congress alongside him - unless, of course, he wants to raise taxes.
Continue reading "Damn, a trillion dollars would have come in handy" »
I had the good fortune this week to take part in some very interesting – and inspiring – initiatives aimed at communicating climate change by merging science with the arts.
The first of these was Tipping Point’s Oxford Conference, which brought together an eclectic mix of over 100 social and natural scientists, authors, journalists and a wide variety of artists from ceramicists to ‘circus theatre makers’.
As someone who spends most waking hours thinking about climate change in a rational way, I found it refreshing – and fun - to come at it from a completely different angle. We had ‘show and tell’ workshops where we discussed objects relating to climate change that hold special personal significance, and ‘coaching’ sessions to think about how our own actions might make a difference. Participants became innovative in the use of improv objects – from eggs to suitcases – in putting together 2-minute productions on climate change.
The Oxford workshop is just one event hosted by TippingPoint, which aims to ‘harness the power of the imagination to help stabilise the climate’ and was originally founded by Diana Liverman, director of Oxford University's Environmental Change Institute with artist David Buckland and its current executive director Peter Gringold.
Buckland’s other brainchild is Cape Farewell, which brings together a similar – if somewhat smaller (and rather illustrious) – mix of people on an annual voyage to the Arctic. This year’s expedition will see over 40 participants – including musicians Laurie Anderson, KT Tunstall and Martha Wainwright – head to Disko Bay on the east coast of Greenland. The team sets sail on 25 September, but they had a launch event in London’s Science Museum on Tuesday evening. I caught up with Buckland and oceanographer Simon Boxall from the UK National Oceanography Centre, Southampton beforehand to get the low down on the biggest – and most ambitious - Cape Farewell trip yet. The full story is over on Nature News.
Olive Heffernan
Image: Ice Texts, 2004-2005, David Buckland
Cross posted from The Great Beyond
Criminal damage in the name of climate change is not a criminal offence, according to a shock ruling from a British court.
A jury yesterday acquitted six Greenpeace activists who claimed that the threat of global warming was a ‘lawful excuse’ for the damage they caused while protesting at a coal power plant (see this blog post for background).
Climate change scientist James Hansen had previously backed the six: he released a statement declaring “We will need our Mercedes-driving lawyer friends to tell us if the verdict has greater significance -- but the jurors were common people, not politicians.
“The main point, that the government, the utility, and the fossil fuel industry, were aware of the facts [of climate change] but continued to ignore them are more generally valid worldwide. It raises the question of whether the right people are on trial.”
Eco-warriors’ UK paper of choice The Independent says the verdict “will have shocked ministers and energy companies”. In the Guardian, veteran environment correspondent Jon Videl says it will “embarrass the government and lead to more direct action protests against energy companies”.
Continue reading "Shock climate change verdict acquits Hansen’s heroes " »
Hard to believe: The long-standing notion that old forests are carbon neutral – that is, that from a certain age forests cease to absorb and accumulate carbon – has its origin from a mere decade worth of data from one single site.
Although timidly questioned every so often, this apparently wrong postulate has prevailed for more than 30 years, leaving its mark in the Kyoto Protocol which excludes old-growth forests from national carbon budgets.
The finding, reported in this week’s Nature, that old forests do accumulate carbon, and apparently in vast amounts, is therefore anything but marginal. Tropical forests were excluded from the study, because there are too few monitoring sites. But primary forests in the boreal and temporary regions of the Northern Hemisphere alone capture some 1.3 gigatonnes of carbon a year, the meta-analysis of data from 519 plots of forests between 15 and 800 years of age has revealed. An editor's summary of the paper is here.
“Hence, 15 % of the global forest surface, which is currently not being considered for offsetting increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations, is responsible for at least 10% of the global net ecosystem production,” the authors write.
Obviously, the carbon sequestered in old forest was previously accounted for elsewhere. Disturbingly, given that some offset profiteers praise tree planting as a panacea of sorts for climate change, young forests may actually be sources, rather than sinks, of CO2, if decomposition of soils and older vegetation preceded their creation.
Leaving intact and protecting old forests seems a far better option. This insight comes rather late, but better late than never. Oh, and it will really give climate negotiators something to think about.
My colleague Emma Marris has more in her news story here.
Quirin Schiermeier
Check out my story today on NRCC for details on the IPCC elections held last week. News in brief: Rajendra Pachauri is chairman again - he had no contenstants for the chief job on the next assessment report, having overseen the UN climate panel's transformation to Nobel-winning semi-household name last year. But new co-chairs will lead the three working groups, and their elections had a novel feature: voting.
Last week NASA climatologist Jim Hansen came to London to testify on behalf of activists who defaced the Kingnorth coal-fired power station in Kent, which we recently blogged about here on Climate Feedback. Nature reporter Geoff Brumfiel caught up with Hansen in a London hotel to find out what has got him all hot and bothered. You can read the full story over on Nature News.
Olive Heffernan
After decades on the fringe, geoengineering proposals have almost become mainstream in the last couple of years. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A now has a special issue on the topic (free access as of 5 Sept.).
There are plenty of ideas these days for purposefully messing with large-scale Earth systems in the hope of offsetting global warming. The Phil Trans A articles don't catalogue them, though Stephen Schneider of Stanford touches on many in a great review article. A pair of papers by the University of Edinburgh's Stephen Salter, NCAR's John Latham, and their colleagues discuss spraying micron-wide particles of sea water into the air to make clouds whiter so that they reflect more light. Ocean fertilization is defended against 20 years of outcry by Victor Smetacek of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research and Wajih Naqvi of the Indian National Institute of Oceanography. And one from Philip Rasch of NCAR and co-authors deals with sulphate aerosols.
But the journal also gives space to plans for power-plant carbon capture - which in fairness was only recently promoted (or de-promoted) out of the geoengineering category - and one of the lesser-known alternative fuels. And the overall focus is the same philosophical question discussed at a recent EGU meeting: how seriously should we pursue geoengineering, given the dangers of huge side effects?
Continue reading "Geoengineering: preparing for the worst " »
As residents of New Orleans prepare to return home and breathe a sigh of relief that Hurricane Gustav was less damaging than feared, new research published today in Nature [subscription] suggests that the strongest tropical cyclones will pick up speed in the coming decades.
Weighing in on the long-running and at times very stormy debate over whether and how warmer seas will affect the intensity and frequency of hurricanes is a team led by climatologist James Elsner of Florida State University.
Using a 25-year archive of satellite data, Elsner and colleagues derive wind speeds for tropical cyclones over the globe. They find that the maximum wind speeds reached by the strongest tropical cyclones increased from 1981-2006 in most ocean basins, with the greatest changes in the North Atlantic and Northern Indian Oceans.
There was no trend in the intensity of cyclones occuring over the South Pacific, however, and the upward trend observed over a couple of ocean regions was not statistically significant. The researchers also found no increase in either the frequency or average intensity of tropical cyclones over the globe.
The approach taken by Elsner and colleagues – looking at whether the most severe cyclones will hit a higher speed limit during their lifetime – is both novel and socially relevant, simply because the most severe storms do the most damage if they make landfall. Once tropical cyclones reach speeds of over 74mph, they are officially classified as hurricanes.
The real bone of contention within the scientific community has been whether hurricanes will become more intense and more frequent as a result of human-induced climate change. Elsner and colleagues steer well clear of linking the trend to global warming though - they can’t attribute cause as their study doesn’t investigate other factors such as cyclone origin and duration, proximity to land, El Niño conditions and solar activity.
Continue reading "As Gustav subsides, new study says strongest cyclones will pick up speed" »
At the IPCC’s twentieth birthday party Sunday, UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon urged the diplomats present to get moving - now - on the post-Kyoto climate treaty. "We must fight the urge to postpone everything until Copenhagen,” where the treaty is to be finalized in 2009, he said. “Surely we can make concrete progress on some issues."
How much progress? The glass-half-full view is that the latest talks, wrapping up in Accra, Ghana, last week, already took some modest but visible steps forward - particularly on reducing emissions from deforestation and heavy industry. On the other hand, the major climate conference in Poznan, Poland, this December happens while President Bush is still in office, meaning that any change in the US stance is on hold until 2009.
And if this year’s meeting prepares the ground well enough to avoid bitter eleventh-hour struggles over crucial divisions in Copenhagen, it will be a historic first.
To mark the IPCC’s anniversary, NRCC debuted a timeline of the international policy debates that first gave birth to the IPCC, and then were shaped by its findings. In sifting through accounts of past climate negotiations while working on the timeline, I was struck by the invariable tales of gruesome battles into the wee hours. The classic was Kyoto in 1997, as reported by the Washington Post:
Cross posted from The Great Beyond
The contentious ‘hockey stick’ climate change graph has again been upheld as broadly accurate, doubtless to the rage of climate denialists/sceptics/whatevers.
A team led by Michael Mann of Penn State University has looked at a whole range of proxies for surface temperatures over the last 2,000 years in an attempt to counter criticism of the graph, which showed a long ‘handle’ and a sharp upturn (the blade).
Their findings? As the Christian Science Monitor puts it: “It still looks a lot like the much-battered, but still rink-ready stick of 1998. Today the handle reaches further back and it’s a bit more gnarly. But the blade at the business end tells the same story.”
The previous hockey stick had been accused of relying too much on data from tree rings so this PNAS study may silence some of the critics when it appears later.
Whether it’s the US agreeing to greenhouse gas emissions targets, passing federal cap-and-trade legislation or allowing climate scientists to speak out about their work, the accepted wisdom has been that such things will come about once George W is replaced as president.
But John McCain’s surprise pick of Sarah Palin, the Alaskan governor, as his running mate could throw that theory out the window – at least if the Republicans are elected to the White House. And if national polls are anything to go by, it looks like, whoever wins in November, it’s going to be close.
How either candidate would, once in office, balance the need for energy security and independence with sharp reductions in greenhouse gases remains to be seen. But at the very least both Obama and McCain recognise the role of human activity in climate change, and the need to do something about it.
Palin, on the other hand, apparently doesn’t, as has been widely reported on the blogosphere. Check out the coverage over on Salon, Climate Progress, and on the Christian Science Monitor’s blog, which reports the following:
Massachusetts Senator John Kerry called her a member of the “flat-earth caucus” this morning on ABC News’ “This Week.”“With the choice of Gov. Palin, it’s the third term of Dick Cheney,” he said. “He’s chosen somebody who doesn’t believe climate change is man-made.”
Kerry seems to be accurate describing her opinion on climate change. She did tell Newsmax she wasn’t convinced.
“A changing environment will affect Alaska more than any other state, because of our location,” Palin said. “I’m not one though who would attribute it to being man-made.”
Her position contrasts with official GOP line on climate change, so it’s hard to know what comprises would be made on this issue if the pair get elected. But the fact that McCain has chosen Palin as a running mate has left some questioning his commitment to tackling climate change. In the meantime, Obama has responded to a 14-part questionnaire from Science Debate 2008 on how he would address some big issues in science, while McCain has yet to respond.
Olive Heffernan
For the latest comment, analysis, news and features, go to Nature Reports Climate Change, Nature’s online resource dedicated to in-depth coverage of climate science and the implications for policy, the economy and society.