Category: Global Warming

“Sea-Level Projections Too High” from Global Warming

(p. A10) In the summer of 2015, two New York Times journalists joined a team of researchers in Greenland that was conducting a unique experiment: directly measuring a river of meltwater runoff on the top of the ice.
Now, the scientists have published the results of that work. A key finding — that not as much meltwater flows immediately through the ice sheet and drains to the ocean as previously estimated — may have implications for sea-level rise, one of the major effects of climate change.
The scientists say it appears that some of the meltwater is retained in porous ice instead of flowing to the bottom of the ice sheet and out to sea.
“It’s always treated as a parking lot, water runs straight off,” said Laurence C. Smith, a geographer at the University of California, Los Angeles who led the field work in 2015. “What we found is that it appears there is water retention.”
“It’s plausible that this is quite an important process, which could render sea-level projections too high,” he added.
There’s still much that remains unknown about the ice sheet, which at roughly 650,000 square miles is more than twice the size of Texas.
. . .
When he first sent the results to modelers, Dr. Smith said, “they couldn’t believe it.” After months of back-and-forth, Dr. Smith and his colleagues concluded that the model estimates were accurate, but there was something else going on with some of the meltwater. “What is missing,” he said, “is a physical process that is not currently considered by the models — water retention in ice.”
. . .
“If there’s a mismatch between observation and model,” Dr. Tedesco said, “that means the model is moving the mass in one way or another and not respecting the way things happen in the real world.”

For the full story, see:
HENRY FOUNTAIN AND DEREK WATKINS . “As Greenland Melts, Where’s the Water Going?” The New York Times (Mon., DEC. 13, 2017): A10.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date DEC. 5 [sic], 2017.)

The published article presenting the results briefly mentioned above, is:
Smith, Laurence C., Kang Yang, Lincoln H. Pitcher, Brandon T. Overstreet, Vena W. Chu, Åsa K. Rennermalm, Jonathan C. Ryan, Matthew G. Cooper, Colin J. Gleason, Marco Tedesco, Jeyavinoth Jeyaratnam, Dirk van As, Michiel R. van den Broeke, Willem Jan van de Berg, Brice Noel, Peter L. Langen, Richard I. Cullather, Bin Zhao, Michael J. Willis, Alun Hubbard, Jason E. Box, Brittany A. Jenner, and Alberto E. Behar. “Direct Measurements of Meltwater Runoff on the Greenland Ice Sheet Surface.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 114, no. 50 (2017): E10622-E31.

Global Warming Could Be Reduced by Sequestering Carbon in Soil

(p. 7) . . . scientists are documenting how sequestering carbon in soil can produce a double dividend: It reduces climate change by extracting carbon from the atmosphere, and it restores the health of degraded soil and increases agricultural yields.
. . .
Among the advocates of so-called regenerative agriculture is the climate scientist and activist James Hansen, lead author of a paper published in July that calls for the adoption of “steps to improve soil fertility and increase its carbon content” to ward off “deleterious climate impacts.”
Rattan Lal, the director of the Carbon Management and Sequestration Center at Ohio State, estimates that soil has the potential to sequester carbon at a rate of between 0.9 and 2.6 gigatons per year. That’s a small part of the 10 gigatons a year of current carbon emissions, but it’s still significant. Somewhat reassuringly, some scientists believe the estimate is low.
“Putting the carbon back in soil is not only mitigating climate change, but also improving human health, productivity, food security, nutrition security, water quality, air quality — everything,” Mr. Lal told me over the phone. “It’s a win-win-win option.”

For the full commentary, see:
JACQUES LESLIE. “OPINION; Soil Power! The Dirty Way to a Green Planet.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., DEC. 3, 2017): 7.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date DEC. 2, 2017, and has the title “Wind and Solar Power Advance, but Carbon Refuses to Retreat.”)

The Hansen paper, mentioned above, is:
Hansen, James, Makiko Sato, Pushker Kharecha, Karina von Schuckmann, David J. Beerling, Junji Cao, Shaun Marcott, Valerie Masson-Delmotte, Michael J. Prather, Eelco J. Rohling, Jeremy Shakun, Pete Smith, Andrew Lacis, Gary Russell, and Reto Ruedy. “Young People’s Burden: Requirement of Negative Co2 Emissions.” Earth System Dynamics 8 (2017): 577-616.

“Renewables Are Not the Answer”

(p.B1) . . . : Global carbon-dioxide emissions have stopped rising. Coal use in China may have peaked. The price of wind turbines and solar panels is plummeting, putting renewable energy within the reach of meager budgets in the developing world.
And yet as climate diplomats gather this week in Bonn, Germany, for the 23rd Conference of the Parties under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, I would like to point their attention to a different, perhaps gloomier statistic: the world’s carbon intensity of energy.
(p. B2) The term refers to a measure of the amount of CO2 spewed into the air for each unit of energy consumed. It offers some bad news: It has not budged since that chilly autumn day in Kyoto 20 years ago. Even among the highly industrialized nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the carbon intensity of energy has declined by a paltry 4 percent since then, according to the International Energy Agency.
This statistic, alone, puts a big question mark over the strategies deployed around the world to replace fossil energy. In a nutshell:
. . .
The most worrisome aspect about the all-out push for a future powered by renewables has to do with cost: The price of turbines and solar panels may be falling, but the cost of integrating these intermittent sources of energy — on when the wind blows and the sun shines; off when they don’t — is not. This alone will sharply curtail the climate benefits of renewable power.
Integrating renewable sources requires vast investments in electricity transmission — to move power from intermittently windy and sunny places to places where power is consumed. It requires maintaining a backstop of idle plants that burn fossil fuel, for the times when there is no wind or sun to be had. It requires investing in power-storage systems at a large scale.

For the full commentary, see:
EDUARDO PORTER. “Why Slashing Nuclear Power May Backfire.” The New York Times (Weds., NOV. 8, 2017): B1-B2.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date NOV. 7, 2017, and has the title “Wind and Solar Power Advance, but Carbon Refuses to Retreat.”)

Record High Temperatures in London

(p. C6) During London’s long summer of 1858, the sweltering temperatures spawned squalor. With a population of more than 2 million, London had outgrown its medieval waste-removal systems, turning Spenser’s “sweet Thames” into an open sewer. Epidemics such as cholera and diphtheria ravaged the poor and rich alike. The stench, as we now know, was a symptom of a bacterial problem. But at the time it was believed to be, in itself, the cause of disease. The dominant medical notion of miasmas held that “noxious and morbific” contagion was carried through the air.
The heat of 1858 made the problem of London’s effluvia unignorable. At the end of May, Rosemary Ashton notes in “One Hot Summer,” the temperature was 84 degrees in the shade; there followed three months of hot days, with record highs in the 90s for the shade and well over 110 degrees in the sun.
. . .
The Great Stink, as the noisome ordeal came to be called, is a terrific subject for Ms. Ashton, the noted scholar of George Eliot, George Henry Lewes and literary London. She excels at unearthing and explaining the daily distractions of the nose-holding populace over the course of the summer: horse races, art shows, murder and divorce trials, even the breezes that, as Darwin noted, wafted thistle seeds across the English Channel from France. Ms. Ashton also convincingly uses the Great Stink as a backdrop to crisis points in the lives of three great figures of the day whose biographies rarely overlap: Darwin, Disraeli and Charles Dickens.

For the full review, see:

Alexandra Mullen. “The Stink That Sank London; As highs climbed toward 100 degrees, raw sewage roasting on the Thames created the ‘Great Stink’.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Aug. 20, 2017): C6.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Aug. 11, 2017.)

The book under review, is:
Ashton, Rosemary. One Hot Summer: Dickens, Darwin, Disraeli, and the Great Stink of 1858. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017.

German Energy Consumers Pay Double Due to Ineffective Solar Subsidies

(p. B1) BETZIGAU, Germany — Katharina Zinnecker’s farm in the foothills of the German Alps has been in the family since 1699. But to squeeze a living from it today, she and her husband need to do more than sell the milk from their herd of cows.
So they carpeted the roofs of their farm buildings with solar panels. And thanks to hefty government guarantees, what they earn from selling electricity is “safe money, not like cows,” Ms. Zinnecker said. “Milk prices go up and down.”
The farm has been a beneficiary of “Energiewende,” the German word for energy transition. Over the past two decades, Germany has focused its political will and treasure on a world-leading effort to wean its powerful economy off the traditional energy sources blamed for climate change.
The benefits of the program have not been universally felt, however. A de facto class system has emerged, saddling a group of have-nots with higher electricity bills that help subsidize the installation of solar panels and wind turbines elsewhere.
. . .
(p. B2) . . . renewable energy subsidies are financed through electric bills, meaning that Energiewende is a big part of the reason prices for consumers have doubled since 2000.
These big increases “are absolutely not O.K.,” said Thomas Engelke, team leader for construction and energy at the Federation of German Consumer Organizations, an umbrella organization of consumer groups.
The higher prices have had political consequences.
The far-right party Alternative for Germany, which won enough support in the recent elections to enter Parliament, has called for an “immediate exit” from Energiewende. The party, known by its German initials AfD, sees the program as a “burden” on German households, and many supporters have come into its fold in part because of the program’s mounting costs.
Julian Hermneuwöhner is one such voter. Mr. Hermneuwöhner, a 27-year-old computer science student, said his family paid an additional €800 a year because of Energiewende.
“But it hasn’t brought lower CO2 emissions,” he said. “It’s frustrating that we’re paying so much more, because the country hasn’t gotten anything for it.”
As a clean energy pioneer, Germany has not always seen the results it desired from its heavy spending.
. . .
. . . progress has been undone somewhat by the government’s decision to accelerate its phase out of nuclear power after the 2011 disaster in Fukushima, Japan. That has made the country more reliant on its sizable fleet of coal-fired power stations, which account for the bulk of emissions from electricity generation.
The country has yet to address the transport industry, where emissions have increased as the economy boomed and more cars and trucks hit the road.

For the full story, see:
STANLEY REED. “$222 Billion Shift Hits a Snag.” The New York Times (Thurs., OCT. 7, 2017): B1-B2.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the title “Germany’s Shift to Green Power Stalls, Despite Huge Investments.”)

Adapting Coral to Thrive as Oceans Warm

(p. A6) As they spent days working through a stretch of ocean off the Australian state of Queensland, Dr. Cantin and his colleagues surfaced with sample after sample of living coral that had somehow dodged a recent die-off: hardy survivors, clinging to life in a graveyard.
“We’re trying to find the super corals, the ones that survived the worst heat stress of their lives,” said Dr. Cantin, a researcher with the Australian Institute of Marine Science in Townsville.
The goal is not just to study them, but to find the ones with the best genes, multiply them in tanks on land and ultimately return them to the ocean where they can continue to breed. The hope is to create tougher reefs — to accelerate evolution, essentially — and slowly build an ecosystem capable of surviving global warming and other human-caused environmental assaults.
. . .
Under normal conditions the animals grow and build their reefs only slowly, one of the factors that is stymying the effort to save them. “We can do all this work here, but can we scale it up enough to make an impact?” Ms. Davidson asked.
Researchers in Florida may be closest to answering that question. At the Mote laboratory in Sarasota, a researcher named David Vaughan has perfected a technique in which coral samples are broken into tiny fragments; the polyps grow much faster than normal as they attempt to re-establish a colony.
“It used to take us six years to produce 600 corals,” Dr. Vaughan said in an interview. “Now we can produce 600 corals in an afternoon, and be ready in a few months to plant them.”
. . .
A center in Key Largo, the Coral Restoration Foundation, has had particular success in bringing back two species, elkhorn and staghorn corals, that had been devastated in Florida waters. The state legislature has begun to appropriate small sums as Florida’s scientists dream of reef restoration on a huge scale.
Though the risks remain unclear, the day may come when many of the reefs off Florida and Australia will be ones created by scientific intervention — a human effort, in other words, to repair the damage humans have done.
“We’ve shown that there is hope in all of this,” said Kayla Ripple, manager of the science program at the Coral Restoration Foundation. “People shouldn’t just throw their hands in the air and say there’s nothing we can do.”

For the full story, see:

DAMIEN CAVE and JUSTIN GILLIS. “Building a Reef Tough Enough To Survive a More Perilous Sea.” The New York Times (Sat., September 30, 2017): A6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date SEPT. 20 [sic], 2017, and has the title “Building a Better Coral Reef.”)

Italians Learning to Eat the Jellyfish That Thrive with Global Warming

(p. A8) MARINA di GINOSA, Italy — As a small boat loaded with wet suits, lab equipment and empty coolers drifted into the warm turquoise sea, Stefano Piraino looked back at the sunbathers on the beach and explained why none of them set foot in the water.
“They know the jellyfish are here,” said Dr. Piraino, a professor of zoology at the University of Salento.
While tourists throughout Europe seek out Apulia, in Italy’s southeast, for its Baroque whitewashed cities and crystalline seas, swarms of jellyfish are also thronging to its waters.
Climate change is making the waters warmer for longer, allowing the creatures to breed gelatinous generation after gelatinous generation.
The jellyfish population explosion has blossomed for years, but got a special boost since 2015 with the broadening of the Suez Canal, which opened up an aquatic superhighway for invasive species to the Mediterranean.
The jellyfish invasion has now reached the point where there may be little to do but find a way to live with huge numbers of them, say scientists like Dr. Piraino.
. . .
Convinced that climate change and overfishing will force Italians to adapt, as they once did to other foreign intruders, like the tomato, his team has launched the Go Jelly project, which roughly boils down to, if you can’t beat ’em, eat ’em.
The study, which officially gets underway in January, will attempt to show that the enormous and increasing jellyfish biomasses can be the inexhaustible Jell-O of the sea.
While overfishing, warmer seas and pollution may wipe out ocean predators, they are allowing jellyfish to thrive — and reproduction comes easily enough to jellyfish.
. . .
Dr. Piraino has plumbed the mysteries of the creature, more than half-a-billion years old, for its possible uses. Those include the potential to fight tumors, and also using collagen-heavy species as a source for more voluptuous lips.
Then, there is food.
Antonella Leone is a researcher at Italy’s Institute of Sciences of Food Production, and since about two months ago, Dr. Piraino’s wife. At their wedding this summer, the couple celebrated with a tiered cake dripping with confectionary jellyfish.
A leader of the Go Jelly project, she thinks that Italians, with their zeal for locally sourced regional ingredients, might just find a taste for jellyfish.
Others already have. The Japanese serve them sashimi style in strips with soy sauce, and the Chinese have eaten them for a millennium.
. . .
Dr. Piraino cut a piece that he said was full of protein and omega-3 fatty acids.
“It’s great,” he said, as it slipped out of his hand.
The chef marinated a piece in garlic and basil for the grill. He prepared another on a bed of arugula next to a sweet fig to balance out what everyone agreed was an intense saltiness.
At the end of the tasting, there were several untouched specimens on the table. Dr. Leone packed the foodstuff of the globally warmed future into a jellyfish doggy bag.

For the full story, see:
JASON HOROWITZ. “As Jellyfish Swarm the Seas Off Italy, a Fix Emerges: Try Ragu, or Sashimi.” The New York Times (Mon., SEPT. 18, 2017): A8.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date SEPT. 17, 2017, and has the title “Jellyfish Seek Italy’s Warming Seas. Can’t Beat ‘Em? Eat ‘Em.”)

Biodiversity May Increase If We “Let the Winners Go on Winning”

(p. C7) In 2004 Mr. Thomas, a biologist at the University of York, garnered headlines with a study predicting that at least a fifth of land animals and plants would be “committed to extinction” by 2050. In “Inheritors of the Earth,” Mr. Thomas does not disavow those findings. A mass extinction is in full swing, he concedes. But the “gloom-merchants” are ignoring the success stories, Mr. Thomas argues, of animals and plants that are thriving in the Anthropocene. Nature, in many respects, “is coping surprisingly well,” he writes, and we shouldn’t ignore “the gain side of the great biological equation of life.”
In some corners of the planet, warmer, wetter conditions have allowed a greater variety of species to survive than would have just decades ago, he points out, while modern transport keeps new immigrants rolling in. The result is a greater number of species in many regions–more local biodiversity–even if the global picture may be trending toward less.
Many species that contribute to diverse and functioning ecosystems aren’t native–they did not evolve where they now occur. And introduced species can jump-start evolutionary processes. They compete with established species, prey on them, or breed with them, and they can occupy ecological niches once occupied by organisms that have died out or are faring poorly.
Mr. Thomas describes a honeysuckle in Pennsylvania that’s a hybrid of species from several remote continents, and yet delicious to local flies, which began to interbreed out of a shared love of its berries; there’s a deer with Japanese genes that’s doing just fine in Scotland’s woods. We should be cheering on these victors, he says, but instead many have been subjected to dubious campaigns to eradicate them.
Conservation usually aims to help the most imperiled species, and favors those with a longer claim to the habitats they occupy. But rather than “always try to defend the losers,” Mr. Thomas proposes, what if we embraced the dynamism of evolution and let the winners go on winning?

For the full review, see:
Jennie Erin Smith. “Picking Sides in the Fight for Survival.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Sept. 23, 2017): C7.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Sept. 22, 2017.)

The book under review, is:
Thomas, Chris D. Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction. New York: PublicAffairs, 2017.

No Increase in Number and Intensity of Hurricanes in Recent Decades

Hurricane researcher Ryan Maue, summarizes his own research:

(p. A19) My own research, cited in a recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, found that during the past half-century tropical storms and hurricanes have not shown an upward trend in frequency or accumulated energy. Instead they remain naturally variable from year-to-year. The global prevalence of the most intense storms (Category 4 and 5) has not shown a significant upward trend either. Historical observations of extreme cyclones in the 1980s, especially in the Southern Hemisphere, are in sore need of reanalysis.

By focusing on whether climate change caused a hurricane, journalists fail to appreciate the complexity of extreme weather events. While most details are still hazy with the best climate modeling tools, the bigger issue than global warming is that more people are choosing to live in coastal areas, where hurricanes certainly will be most destructive.

For the full commentary, see:
Ryan Maue. “Climate Change Hype Doesn’t Help; The bigger issue than global warming is that more people are choosing to live in coastal areas.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., Sept. 17, 2017): A19.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Sept. 18, 2017.)

Maue’s research, that he mentions above, is reported in:

Maue, Ryan N. “Recent Historically Low Global Tropical Cyclone Activity.” Geophysical Research Letters 38, no. 14 (2011): 1-6.

“Hurricane Superstar” Had No Use For Global Warming

(p. 24) William M. Gray, whose pioneering research helped him make hurricane predictions for three decades and allowed the East Coast and the Caribbean to gird for their fury, died on Saturday [April 23, 2016] in Fort Collins, Colo. He was 86.
. . .
Dr. Gray issued his first data-driven seasonal forecast in 1984. He eventually aggregated measures of atmospheric conditions, water current and water temperature to predict the number and intensity of tropical storms, rather than their paths or potential landfalls.
. . .
Dr. Gray was skeptical about the causes of climate change, prompting vitriolic exchanges with other scientists. Judith A. Curry, who was chairwoman of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, accused him of “brain fossilization.”
Dr. Gray was less alarmed than many of his colleagues at the rate of climate change and attributed it to natural causes, like the circulation of heat-bearing ocean currents, rather than to the human-made greenhouse effect of heat-trapping gasses from burning fossil fuels like coal and oil.
“After unveiling the first Atlantic seasonal hurricane forecasting system in 1984, he became a hurricane superstar and darling of the media,” Chris Mooney wrote in 2007 in “Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming.” “But he had absolutely no use for the notion of global warming, much less the idea that it might seriously affect the storms he’d spent a lifetime studying. And he had no problem saying so — loudly and often.”
In an interview with Westword, a Denver online newsletter, in 2006, Dr. Gray said, “When I am pushing up daisies, I am very sure that we will find that humans have warmed the globe slightly, but that it’s nothing like what they’re saying.”

For the full obituary, see:
SAM ROBERTS. “William M. Gray, 86, a Predictor of Hurricanes’ Fury.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., APRIL 24, 2016): 24.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date APRIL 20 [sic], 2016, and has the title “William M. Gray, Hurricane Predictor and Climate Change Skeptic, Dies at 86.”)

The book by Mooney, mentioned above, is:
Mooney, Chris. Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle over Global Warming. Orlando, FL: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007.

Natural Gas Tanker Reaches South Korea 30 Percent Faster, Through Arctic

(p. 12) A Russian-owned tanker, built to traverse the frozen waters of the Arctic, completed a journey in record time from Europe to Asia this month, auguring the future of shipping as global warming melts sea ice.
The Christophe de Margerie, a 984-foot tanker built specifically for the journey, became the first ship to complete the so-called Northern Sea Route without the aid of specialized ice-breaking vessels, the ship’s owner, Sovcomflot, said in a statement.
. . .
The ship, transporting liquefied natural gas, completed the trip from Norway to South Korea Thursday of last week, in just 19 days, 30 percent faster than the regular route through the Suez Canal, the company said.
Sailors have for centuries sought a navigable Northwest Passage: a shorter, faster route between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans that transits the Arctic.

For the full story, see:
RUSSELL GOLDMAN. “No Icebreaker Needed: Thaw Lets Tanker Traverse Arctic.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., AUG. 27, 2017): 12.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date AUG. 25, 2017, and has the title “Russian Tanker Completes Arctic Passage Without Aid of Icebreakers.”)