Climate Feedback

I’ll be heading to Geneva this coming Sunday to attend the World Meteorological Organisation’s third World Climate Conference. The conference, which runs from August 31 until September 4, takes climate prediction as its theme, and aims to establish an international framework to guide the development of climate services, linking climate predictions with climate-risk management and adaptation. This should an interesting opportunity to look in more depth at the issue of whether climate prediction is indeed scientifically feasible and if so, at what it will take to move from climate projections to predictions.

I’ll be blogging from the conference daily to Climate Feedback, and you can follow me on twitter@oliveh

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on August 28, 2009
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Adapting to climate change will cost many times more than the UN has estimated, according to a report by former IPCC working group co-chair Martin Parry and colleagues, published by the International Institute for Environment and Development and the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London.

In 2007 the UNFCCC calculated that the bill for adaptation would run to $49-171 billion per year by 2030, and these figures show up regularly in international policy negotiations. In a press release, Parry says the true cost will be 2-3 times higher in the sectors the UN looked at - and impacts in sectors that have been ignored will raise the total even further.

Though the report notes the UNFCCC commissioned six studies to get its numbers, Parry says the work was done in haste. "Many of the previous estimates, it would be fair to say, were based on back-of-the-envelope calculations. In fact, one person said they were written on the back of a metro ticket," he tells The Independent.

He worries that lowball back-of-a-metro-ticket numbers create the illusion that adaptation is a cheap alternative to mitigation. He says in Nature News’s story, "Sceptics could argue we should just walk into the future adapting as we go."

Continue reading "The high cost of adaptation" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on August 28, 2009
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If the United States starts weaning off of oil and coal and onto homegrown biofuels, renewables, nuclear and other options, how much land will be gobbled up by new forms of energy production? This future "energy sprawl" is calculated in a PLoS ONE paper this week. Biofuels will have the biggest impact, Nature News reports:

"The researchers estimate that regardless of whether the Waxman-Markey bill were enacted, the amount of land affected by energy development by 2030 will be between 21-70 million hectares — an area which is, even at its lower bound, about the size of the state of Wyoming.

"A cap-and-trade bill may have some incremental effect in increasing energy sprawl, but most of the development that's going to happen is because of other laws that are already in place," says study author Robert McDonald, a landscape ecologist with The Nature Conservancy, a non-profit environmental organization based in Arlington, Virginia.

Those other laws include the US renewable fuel standard, which requires that the volume of renewable fuel blended into gasoline is increased from 34 billion litres in 2008 to 136 billion litres by 2022. That increase will require an area of between 19 and 31 million hectares — the largest component of McDonald's projected energy sprawl, despite the fact that biofuels are expected to comprise less than 5% of the country's total energy budget.

McDonald and co-authors warn that without careful management the sprawl may wreck important habitats and eat into biodiversity. Exotic innovations like algae-based fuels - recently brought into the renewable fuel scheme - could help. But there's a cheap and obvious option we could look at first, MacDonald notes. To conserve habitat, simply conserve energy.

Read the full story here.

Image: Getty

Posted by Anna Barnett on August 27, 2009
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The trailer for the Nature film series from Lindau has just been released. You can watch it here. The trailer introduces the Lindau Meetings and the six films that follow – we’ll be releasing the films one a week from Thursday. The climate film, ‘The Two Degree Target’ is the grand finale and will be released on Thursday 1st October at around 6pm London time.

Posted by Olive Heffernan on August 26, 2009
Categories: Communicating Climate Change, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

As warming starts to shake up marine food webs, ecologists say it may give an unexpected boost to some fisheries - but also make them more precarious.

This is one of the implications of a new experimental study in PloS Biology that takes a panoramic point of view. Rather than tackling complex food webs species by species, the authors look at how warming affects growth and metabolism across the board within the broad groups of organisms at the base of the web.

Mary O’Connor of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and colleagues turned up temperatures in outdoor containers holding phytoplankton, the ocean’s primary producers, and bacteria and zooplankton, the smallest consumers. Warming of two to six degrees drove up the productivity of phytoplankton, as expected. But consumers increased their growth even more. Zooplankton retain only about 10% of the biomass they eat, so total biomass declined as the hungry hordes munched on the phytoplankton.

Zooplankton are fish food. O’Connor tells New Scientist, "The effect could be translated up the food chain" to a gain in fisheries, but “that top-heavy food web structure could be less stable, and crash all together." The group found that the consumer boom was much greater when nutrients were added, so they suggest that food webs in nutrient-poor waters - such as the ocean surface - may be more resilient to climate change.

The study is timely: NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center recently announced that world ocean temperatures were the hottest on record last month. The temperatures beat the 20th-century average by nearly 0.6 degrees Celsius. According to AP, meteorologists are attributing the record high to a combination of global warming trends, an El Nino phase just getting started, and other natural variation. Apparently, an unusual and unexplained weather pattern this summer is concentrating warmth over the ocean while land surfaces stay cooler.

And this won’t be a brief blip in sea temperatures:

Breaking heat records in water is more ominous as a sign of global warming than breaking temperature marks on land, because water takes longer to heat up and does not cool off as easily as land.

"This warm water we're seeing doesn't just disappear next year; it'll be around for a long time," said climate scientist Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria in British Columbia.

Anna Barnett

Image: Mysis zooplankton / Uwe Kils, Creative Commons license

Posted by Anna Barnett on August 25, 2009
Categories: Anna Barnett, Biodiversity and Ecology, In the News, Ocean science | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

You may have heard already that cow farts are a climatic threat. Scientific American points out some research that turns the problem around: climate change can also affect cows and dry up dairy production.

In Climatic Change this month, Terry Mader of the University of Nebraska and colleagues model the impact on Midwestern dairy cows if carbon dioxide doubles or triples. Their simulation combined two different global climate models with a model of cow physiology - which, says Mader, is rather more tractable than the Earth system.

SciAm erroneously reports that the group concluded US milk yields would fall 16-30% during summer, about twice the decline farmers normally expect. Actually, this is a the conclusion of another study mentioned in the paper's Discussion section. The authors say these figures are "slightly greater but still in close agreement" with their own data, which show that a doubling of carbon dioxide would decrease the already-low summer production by an additional 1-3%, and a tripling would drive it down by up to 7.5%.

Hot spells do costly damage to dairy farming, notes the story:

In July 2006, a month long triple-digit heat wave scorched California, killing more than 25,000 cattle and reducing dairy production in the region. Land O'Lakes Creameries, which normally produces six million liters of milk daily, was short 1.5 million liters per day. All told, experts estimate that the high temperatures caused $1 billion worth of dairy shortfalls.

One strategy for beating the heat is to breed more tolerant herds. A study in PLoS One this week catalogs genetic markers that are associated with cows' sensitivity to environmental conditions. This seems more promising than the adaptation alternative that occurred to me, which is for the Land O'Lakes Creameries to return to the Land O'Lakes.

Anna Barnett

Posted by Anna Barnett on August 21, 2009
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A new reservoir of fossil fuel could be ready to tap much sooner than previously thought. R&Ders have been talking up natural gas extraction from methane hydrates - a solid form of the greenhouse gas, found tucked away beneath the sea floor where low temperature and high pressure keep it stable.

Following an enthusiastic Congressional testimony, Ray Boswell of the US Department of Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) has a commentary in Science on hydrates’ potential as an energy source. But methane hydrates are also making headlines this week as a worrying harbinger of climate change. Some scientists have warned that ocean warming could destabilize hydrates and send methane gas bubbling into the ocean. Now a team led by Graham Westbrook of the University of Birmingham has spotted over 250 such gas plumes near Svalbard, Norway - echoing a similar observation from a group in Siberia earlier this year.

Much of the released gas dissolves in the water column, but any portion that reaches the air could amplify warming.
By drilling for hydrates, could we wake a sleeping giant? Boswell doesn’t tackle this question head on, but he offers some relevant points.

First off, hydrates in the Arctic - where gas plumes have been seen - are hard to get at. Before they go messing with the permafrost lid that protects the vast northern stores of methane, prospectors will find more enticing targets, says Boswell. Specifically, it’s hydrates found in sandy deposits in the Gulf of Mexico that are raising hopes at NETL.

Hydrate-bearing sands were first spotted off Japan in 1999. By recent estimates the Gulf of Mexico holds 190 trillion cubic meters of natural gas in such sands - over 300 times the amount of gas the US burns annually. An April expedition to probe the Gulf's deposits found promising pockets of highly saturated hydrates. There are technical and economic hurdles to extracting this gas, says Boswell, but many could be overcome with existing technology. That's a big difference from the hydrates known a decade ago, which were dispersed across muddy fields or packed into solid mounds.

Methane from sandy hydrates may also be easier to control. Boswell writes:

These resevoirs are commonly buried many hundreds of meters below the sea floor and enclosed in a matrix of impermeable sediments that help to prevent the escape of released methane. The most prospective gas hydrate deposits are also those that are most effectively buffered from environmental change.

Speaking of which, does the world need another fossil fuel reservoir? Not if you’re hoping our supplies will run out in time to save the climate. But with the world facing dwindling oil reserves and a sluggish start on renewables, Boswell implies the gas could fill an important gap: “hydrates may offer an important ‘bridging’ fuel that will help ease the transition to the sustainable energy supplies of the future.”

Anna Barnett

Image: Methane actively dissociating from a hydrate mound / National Energy Technology Lab

Posted by Anna Barnett on August 21, 2009
Categories: Anna Barnett, Cryosphere, Energy, In the News | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Rice paddies produce an estimated 20% of the methane released by human activities. But according to data presented at a Beijing climate conference last week, a switch to certain farming practices could erase most of those emissions. Jane Qiu reports on the research over at Nature News.

Earlier this year, Xiaoyuan Yan of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and colleagues came out with a notably low estimate of global rice-paddy methane emissions. Unlike other surveys, this one took into account the methane-busting practices of draining paddies mid-season and applying rice straw between crops.

Qiu’s story highlights work from a different American-Chinese team - Chris Butenhoff and Aslam Khalil of Portland State University and Xiong Zhenqin of Nanjing Agricultural University. Mid-season paddy draining has been common in China since the 1980s, the group points out, because it increases rice yield and saves water. By looking at the spread of paddy-draining and straw-strewing practices and at experiments that show the effects of such techniques, the researchers estimate that methane emissions from Chinese paddies have fallen nearly 70% from 1980 levels.

The catch? Drained paddies emit more nitrous oxide, another potent greenhouse gas. Still, the net effect is equivalent to taking 270 million tonnes of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere annually. But outside China, mid-season drainage is not commonly practiced. Low-hanging fruit, anyone?

Anna Barnett

Image: Punchstock

Posted by Anna Barnett on August 19, 2009
Categories: Anna Barnett, In the News, Mitigation | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In this year’s series of UN climate talks - the latest of which took place last week in Bonn - one of the issues negotiators are sinking their teeth into is a source of greenhouse gases that has previously been sidestepped. Chopping and burning trees causes an estimated one-fifth of global emissions, and slowing down deforestation could be the cheapest and quickest way to keep a substantial load of gas out of the atmosphere. With this in mind, the Bali meeting in 2007 called for a decision on forests to be made by the time the 2009 talks wrap up in Copenhagen this December.

But deciding to do something about it and agreeing on what needs to be done are two very different matters, as Mark Schrope writes in a feature on Nature Reports Climate Change this week. He explains:

Some of issues raised are rooted in serious ethical and environmental concerns, such as how to protect indigenous people and ensure compliance. But much of what was being mulled over boils down to money: adequately addressing deforestation will require a new flow of billions of dollars from developed to developing nations. Developing countries are scrambling to position themselves to receive as much as possible, while developed nations are doing their best to ensure they get what they want from their investments. The result is a complex debate that is likely to grow more heated as countries move from stating their positions to settling on an agreement that everyone can live with beyond December.

Continue reading "When money grows on trees" »

Posted by Anna Barnett on August 17, 2009
Categories: Anna Barnett, Biodiversity and Ecology, Deforestation, In the News | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Whether climate change will increase the number of hurricanes is fiercely debated in the research community. There is also strong disagreement between researchers over the accuracy of claims that hurricane activity has peaked over the past ten years.

But a new study in Nature this week (subscription) throws more weight behind arguments that hurricane numbers are on the rise and could continue to surge as a result of global warming. The paper's covered here on Nature News.

The study looked at historical hurricane activity across the entire tropical Atlantic basin to see if the current peak in storm numbers is anomalous. It found that it was not. The results show high hurricane activity also occurred at around 1000 AD, where levels approached that seen today.

Previous research has shown that warm sea surface temperatures could encourage hurricanes to form. Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University and the study's lead author, says the historical peak in hurricane activity coincided with periods of high sea surface temperatures. This suggests that the annual number of hurricanes will continue to increase as a result of global warming, says Mann.

"This tells us that the relationship between sea surface temperatures and cyclone activity seems to be robust and gives support to the debate that we are likely to see an increase in tropical cyclone activity in response to global warming," he says.

But given the passion with which the scientific community is divided on this issue, it’s unlikely we’ve heard the last of this.

Natasha Gilbert

Image: NASA

Posted by Anna Barnett on August 13, 2009
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Many of our readers will no doubt be aware of the long-standing dispute between Steve McIntyre and members of the climate science community whose data McIntyre is keen to get hold of.

For those of you less familiar with the story, here’s some background. McIntyre, who runs the Climate Audit blog, is best known for questioning the validity of the statistical analyses used to create the ‘hockey stick’ graph. The ‘hockey stick’ is the graph that illustrates the past 1000 years of climate based on palaeo proxy data and was published by Penn state climatologist Michael Mann and co-authors in Nature back in 1998.

More recently, McIntyre has turned his attention to criticizing the quality of global temperature data held by institutes such as NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies. Several organizations worldwide collect and report global average temperature data for each month. Of these, a temperature data set held jointly by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia and the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre in Exeter, known as HadCRU , extends back the farthest, beginning in 1850.

Since 2002, McIntyre has repeatedly asked Phil Jones, director of CRU, for access to the HadCRU data. Although the data are made available in a processed gridded format that shows the global temperature trend, the raw station data are currently restricted to academics. While Jones has made data available to some academics, he has refused to supply McIntyre with the data. Between 24 July and 29 July of this year, CRU received 58 freedom of information act requests from McIntyre and people affiliated with Climate Audit. In the past month, the UK Met Office, which receives a cleaned-up version of the raw data from CRU, has received ten requests of its own.

I’ve reported the full story for this week’s Nature, but here’s a breakdown, plus some details that didn’t make the cut.

Why does McIntyre want the data?
Given McIntyre’s track record in critiquing data that comprise a significant part of the evidence for global warming, one might wonder whether he is in fact interested in having a go at reproducing the global temperature record. But McIntyre insists hat he’s not interested in challenging the science of climate change, or in nit-picking; rather he is simply asking that the “data be made available”.

Why won’t Jones give McIntyre the data?
Jones says that he tried to help when he first received data requests from McIntyre back in 2002, but says that he soon became inundated with requests that he could not fulfill, or that he did not have the time to respond to. He says that, in some cases, he simply couldn’t hand over entire data sets because of long-standing confidentiality agreements with other nations that restrict their use.

Although Jones agrees that the data should be made publicly available, he says that “it needs to be done in a systematic way”. He is now working to make the data publicly available online and will post a statement on the CRU website tomorrow to that effect, with any existing confidentiality agreements. “We’re trying to make them all available. We’re consulting with all the meteorological services – about 150 members of WMO – and will ask them if they are happy to release the data”, says Jones. But getting the all-clear from other nations could take several months and there may be objections. “Some countries don’t even have their own data available as they haven’t digitized it. We have done a lot of that ourselves”, he says.

Are there likely to be 'holes' in the data’?
Everyone agrees that raw station data are imperfect; that’s why they are cleaned up before being handed over to the UK Met Office. Jones says that existing issues include stations being relocated without being renamed, but he emphasises that these minor errors do not affect the global temperature trend, because there are thousands of individual stations collecting data worldwide at any one time.

McIntyre says that he does not expect to find any major errors in the data. But he also believes that too few resources are put into quality checking climate data, and that independent professional statistical services should be employed to check the data. Any thoughts on who might offer such services?

What was the CRU ‘data purge’ about?
A couple of weeks ago, it became clear that McIntyre had in fact retrieved some of the HadCRU data from a server on the CRU website. On realizing this, CRU immediately removed the data from their website, leading to speculation about a CRU ‘data lockdown’ over on Climate Audit. It transpires, however, that these data were on an anonymous ftp server intended for Met Office Hadley Centre project partners only, and were not for public use.

What’s next?
Given that McIntyre’s wish for access to the data will take time to be granted, this dispute will likely continue for some time. He’s especially aggrieved by the fact that hurricane expert Peter Webster at Georgia Tech University was recently provided with data that had been refused to him. McIntyre’s point here is that he should be treated as a legitimate academic given his background and publication record.

But Webster points out that he was allowed access because of the nature of his request, which was very specific and will result in a joint publication with Phil Jones. “Reasonable requests should be fulfilled because making data available advances science”, says Webster, “but it has to be an authentic request because otherwise you’d be swamped".

Once the data become publicly available, Jones wants McIntyre to produce a global temperature record. “Science advances that way. He might then realize how robust the global temperature record is”, says Jones. Asked if he would take on the challenge, McIntyre said that it’s not a priority for him, but added “if someone wanted to hire me, I’d do it”.

Olive Heffernan

Posted by Olive Heffernan on August 12, 2009
Categories: Climate Science, Data, Olive Heffernan, Research | Permalink | Comments (101) | TrackBacks (0)

Twenty years after the Montreal Protocol came into effect to regulate substances that deplete the ozone layer, the annual ozone hole above Antarctica shows no signs of recovery.

A feature article and editorial in Nature today explain why this is so, and why the Montreal Protocol has been a unique success nonetheless.

As things stand, scientists expect the first signs of recovery of springtime ozone depletion in the polar stratosphere around the year 2065. Outside polar regions, where chemical ozone destruction is less pronounced but potentially harmful to human health, it appears as if ozone levels are beginning to increase.

Globally, the recovery of ozone will occur in a changing atmospheric environment. Greenhouse gases have a cooling effect on the stratosphere, and climate change is likely to also alter atmospheric transport and circulation patterns.

What this means for the ozone layer is not exactly clear. It appears that the changes will in some places delay its recovery, while elsewhere they might lead to a ‘super-recovery’ of ozone.

But not only must models of ozone loss and recovery factor in global warming – abnormally low stratospheric ozone has also a marked effect on climate change here and now. Most strikingly, extreme seasonal ozone depletion over Antarctica seems to explain why the Antarctic Peninsula is warming at an alarming rate while the rest of the continent has actually cooled over the last 30 years.

Quirin Schiermeier

Image: View of the South Pole from NASA's TOMS (Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer) satellite. Credit: NASA

Posted by Anna Barnett on August 12, 2009
Categories: Atmospheric Science, Climate Policy, Quirin Schiermeier | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Cross-posted from Daniel Cressey on The Great Beyond

Climate change may need a military response from America, according to a story from the New York times which is getting a lot of pick up in the world media.

While most policy discussions around climate change focus on energy wonks, the Times says that military analysts are increasingly of the view that “climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions”. Food and water shortages or huge floods could push vulnerable regions over the edge into crises that could “demand an American humanitarian relief or military response”, it says.

The Times piece quotes from a recent report prepared by retired Marine general Anthony Zinni for private research company CAN. Zinni says:

We will pay for this [climate change] one way or another. We will pay to reduce greenhouse gas emissions today, and we’ll have to take an economic hit of some kind. Or we will pay the price later in military terms. And that will involve human lives. There will be a human toll. There is no way out of this that does not have real costs attached to it. That has to hit home.

Although the Times says the Pentagon is “for the first time” looking seriously at national security and climate change, the idea that global warming could heat up things other than temperatures has been around for a while. Back in July 2008, for example, Nature reporter Jeff Tollefson attended one of the first war games on the subject of global warming. You can read his blog posts from the games in our archive.

Image: frigate USS Doyle in the Pacific Ocean earlier this year / US Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Patrick Grieco

Posted by Anna Barnett on August 10, 2009
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Is geoengineering the best way to fight climate change? It all depends on whom you ask.

Geoengineering, of course, is any scheme to deliberately manipulate the climate to try to counteract global warming. You'll remember it mainly for the most outlandish ideas to cut down on the amount of sunlight reaching Earth: the fleet of mirrored sunshades positioned between the Sun and the Earth, or the massive zeppelins pumping cooling aerosols into the stratosphere from giant hoses tethered to the ground.

Last week, ecologists had their chance to weigh in on some of these proposals at a session -- apparently the first on this topic for this meeting -- at the Ecological Society of America conference in Albuquerque. I've got a story over on Nature News of the sorts of things they talked about. As some readers have pointed out, many ecological impacts of proposed geoengineering schemes did not make it into the story. They include the fact that no matter how much you try to cut down on solar radiation reaching earth, the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will have other knock-on effects, such as acidifying the world's oceans.

In general, the ecologists at the Albuquerque meeting seemed as if they were just now startling to grapple with the enormity of some of the geoengineering suggestions; these are, after all, ideas that are more normally tossed around in geophysics or atmospheric conferences. But if geoengineering is really going to take place -- a question that is far from answered at this point, as so many doubts about it remain -- those who study life on land are going to need to be integrally involved.

Expect more information in early September, when Britain's Royal Society is expected to release a major report on geoengineering.

Posted by Alex Witze on August 10, 2009
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“It’s incredibly important. We need a global deal on the climate.”
Bjorn Lomborg, who formerly put climate change last among the world's priorities, makes a U-turn.

“They stole our name. They stole our logo. They created a position title and made up the name of someone to fill it.”
A lobbying firm subcontracted by a coal advocacy group to fight the US climate bill was caught creating fake letters to congressmen from real community organizations.

"If you look at the group of developing countries in general, having some come forward and take steps is useful, it stops them from hiding more as a bloc, saying it's not possible."
Diane McFadzien of WWF Singapore on South Korea's new emissions targets.

"Praying should of course continue, because our villages should be spared from natural catastrophes. We should at the same time pray that our glacier does not melt any further, but instead grows.''
Rev. Pascal Venetz, pastor at Ernerwald Chapel in southern Switzerland, is seeking the Pope's permission to adjust a 17th century vow that asks God to protect local villages from an advancing alpine glacier.

Posted by Anna Barnett on August 07, 2009
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I've always been fascinated with large-scale ecological manipulation experiments. This week, at the Ecological Society of America meeting in Albuquerque, I got perhaps more than I was looking for.

During a session on results from the recently-concluded International Polar Year, Walt Oechel and Donatella Zona of San Diego State University presented a pair of talks about their work at the Barrow Environmental Observatory. This is a 3,000-hectare reserve, set aside by the Ukpeagvik Inupiat, about 10 kilometers from the coastal town of Barrow, Alaska. The far north coastal town. You really just can't get any farther north in Alaska than Barrow.

Which all goes to show that Barrow is a convenient place for the US to measure changes in the Arctic, and atmospheric researchers have been working there for decades. In the latest work, Oechel and Zona took a lake, 1.2 kilometers long, and divided it into three parts. One part they left alone. One part they pumped water out of, into the third part.

The objective? To manipulate the water table and see what effect that had on greenhouse gas emissions from the tundra. As I report in a story over on Nature News, they found the higher the water table, the more carbon dioxide was given off. This observation relies on just a single year of data so far, but if it turns into a trend - as so many things in the Arctic are these days - it would be more grim news for Arctic carbon fluxes in a globally warmed world.

Posted by Alex Witze on August 06, 2009
Categories: Cryosphere | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Some of scientists’ gravest concerns about future climate change are rooted in the past. Records studied by paleoclimatologists reveal that the more extreme possibilities for this century and beyond — temperatures soaring, ice sheets vanishing, fertile lands withering into deserts — were realized previously on Earth when atmospheric greenhouse gas levels surged. At this summer's AGU Chapman Conference on Abrupt Climate Change, researchers described this turbulent history through all manner of proxies - ice, tree rings, corals, marine and lake sediments, among others. But few talks went without a slide showing the wiggly line of a deep ice core.

Each proxy has its own merits, but ice cores offer records of climatic history whose detail and completeness are unmatched. Their data stretch back 800,000 years and are conveniently located in some of the world’s most climatically sensitive regions. Two new features on Nature Reports Climate Change pay homage to the work of scientists who, over the last few decades, have been tireless in their efforts to extract clues about the Earth’s past climate from air bubbles, isotopes and dust particles trapped in ice.

First, a timeline of deep polar cores documents in fine detail the discoveries of scientific pioneers, from the first efforts to read ice records through to today’s hunt for ice a million years old or more. Complementing this chronology of scientific discovery is an interactive map layer for Google Earth. This virtual tour takes you to the sites where polar researchers have holed up year after year, drilling thousands of metres of Greenland or Antarctic ice before hitting bedrock. In the window below, spin the globe to the pole of your choice, zoom in and click on the map points to see the drilling stations. For a full-size view and more navigation controls - plus a built-in web browser window where you can check out the timeline - download the map layer here and run it in Google Earth, which you can download here.

As I highlighted earlier on the blog, this month's issue of NRCC also features an exclusive interview with world-renowned glaciologist Lonnie Thompson. On his quest to understand how ice is changing atop the world’s mountains, Thompson has spent more spent more time above 20,000 feet than any other human being; he's currently with a team at the Quelccaya glacier in Peru, racing to bring back ice that is rapidly being lost to climate change. The American Museum of Natural History has put together a great video on his work.

Such endeavours come with scientific challenges as well as personal ones. As understanding abrupt climate change becomes increasingly crucial, ambitious plans for studying these icy environs will be ever more important.

Anna Barnett

Posted by Anna Barnett on August 03, 2009
Categories: Anna Barnett, Cryosphere, Palaeoclimate | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)