Eideard

Canada’s northern communities are unprepared to cope with the threat that climate change poses to their roads, buildings and other infrastructure, a new report from the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy says.

“Climate change is moving fastest in Arctic areas, requiring Canada to be a world leader in adaptation practices, more than we had even contemplated,” the group’s chairperson said in a news release.

The independent federal government agency made 16 recommendations, saying a comprehensive effort will be needed to help deal with climate change effects such as degrading permafrost, melting ice roads, storms surges and coastal erosion…

Some of the group’s suggestions include:

updating construction and engineering codes
providing better weather information
insurance system changes
new infrastructure built to withstand climate change

Way too logical.

The report says some of climate-change effects on the North include winter roads melting early, forcing communities to airlift supplies; melting permafrost destabilizing buildings and airport runways; increased snowfall adding additional stress to buildings; and, storm surges putting communities at risk.

Of course, you could turn over advisement to Sarah Palin and her peers in Alaska – who think real freedom lies in having no building codes whatsoever.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—the world’s foremost body for weighing and assessing climate science—received a kick in the pants today from members who say the climate situation is much worse than the IPCC has so far reported.

Twenty-six climatologists—including 14 IPCC members—have released a startling update to the panel’s work, reporting that sea levels could rise and methane-laden arctic permafrost could melt much sooner than the panel had anticipated.

“The Copenhagen Diagnosis: Updating the World on the Latest Climate Science” is not an official IPCC report; it’s a summary of the hundreds of peer-reviewed research papers that have been published since the IPCC’s last assessment. It was released now to fill the long gap in between official IPCC reports—the last was released in 2007, but the drafting text is more than three years old, and the next isn’t scheduled until 2013. It was also timed to the Copenhagen climate talks, of course.

The essence of the new report is that things are grimmer than the IPCC has reported. And it’s not like the panel has been painting a rosy picture—its 2007 report concluded that the warming-induced melting of the Greenland ice sheet could create significant sea-level rise in this century. IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri said at the time, “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.”

RTFA. Conspiracy bloggers and let’s pretend-skeptics all avoid any reading matter that contains the results of peer-reviewed science. They will not have gotten more than 2 paragraphs into this news article, much less the report at root-level.

The full report is available over here.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

East Antarctica’s ice started to melt faster from 2006, which could cause sea levels to rise sooner than anticipated, according to a study by scientists at the University of Texas.

In the study published in Nature’s Geoscience journal, scientists estimated that East Antarctica has been losing ice mass at an average rate of 5 to 109 gigatonnes per year from April 2002 to January 2009, but the rate speeded up from 2006.

The melt rate after 2006 could be even higher, the scientists said.

“The key result is that [we] appear to start seeing a large amount of ice loss in East Antarctica, mostly in the long coastal regions (in Wilkes Land and Victoria Land), since 2006,” Jianli Chen at the university’s centre for space research and one of the study’s authors, told Reuters.

“This, if confirmed, could indicate a state change of East Antarctica, which could pose a large impact on global sea levels in the future,” Chen said…

Climate change is turning Antarctica’s ice into the one of the biggest risks for coming centuries. Even slight melting could drive up sea levels and could affect world’s cities.

Over the several years I have been studying climate change Antarctic ice was thought to be less-affected than the Northern Pole. Now that means and methods have improved, we get to figure out the bad news is universal.

note: at post time, the direct link to the study – in the Reuters article – was broken.

As many of you will be aware, a large number of emails from the University of East Anglia webmail server were hacked recently (Despite some confusion generated by Anthony Watts, this has absolutely nothing to do with the Hadley Centre which is a completely separate institution). As people are also no doubt aware the breaking into of computers and releasing private information is illegal, and regardless of how they were obtained, posting private correspondence without permission is unethical. We therefore aren’t going to post any of the emails here. We were made aware of the existence of this archive last Tuesday morning when the hackers attempted to upload it to RealClimate, and we notified CRU of their possible security breach later that day…

Since emails are normally intended to be private, people writing them are, shall we say, somewhat freer in expressing themselves than they would in a public statement.

More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.

Instead, there is a peek into how scientists actually interact and the conflicts show that the community is a far cry from the monolith that is sometimes imagined. People working constructively to improve joint publications; scientists who are friendly and agree on many of the big picture issues, disagreeing at times about details and engaging in ‘robust’ discussions; Scientists expressing frustration at the misrepresentation of their work in politicized arenas and complaining when media reports get it wrong; Scientists resenting the time they have to take out of their research to deal with over-hyped nonsense. None of this should be shocking.

It’s obvious that the noise-generating components of the blogosphere will generate a lot of noise about this. but it’s important to remember that science doesn’t work because people are polite at all times. Gravity isn’t a useful theory because Newton was a nice person. QED isn’t powerful because Feynman was respectful of other people around him. Science works because different groups go about trying to find the best approximations of the truth, and are generally very competitive about that. That the same scientists can still all agree on the wording of an IPCC chapter for instance is thus even more remarkable.

RTFA – please understand that the tempest in a teacup generated by bloggers committed to skepticism regardless of real data and sound science – is nothing more than that.

My personal understanding of the worth of science versus religious, political and other corrupt philosophic commitments to obscuring progress in knowledge – has been consistent for over a half-century. I’m not about to change, now, just to grub out a few more page views.

An unlikely lobbying group is pressing the U.S. Senate to curb greenhouse gas emissions: American hunting and fishing groups who fear climate change will disrupt their sport.

Hunters and anglers are mainly a Republican Party constituency representing tens of millions of votes in the U.S. heartland and could help swing crucial votes as the Senate tries to pass legislation to cut carbon output.

Twenty national hunting and fishing groups urged senators in a letter last month to ensure “the climate legislation you consider in the Senate both reduces greenhouse gas emissions and safeguards natural resources…”

These groups will be going up against powerful Washington lobbies — the coal and oil industries, for example — that are pushing hard to soften any mandatory pollution controls…

Read the rest of this entry »

Apple is the latest company to quit the U.S. Chamber of Commerce because the technology company disagrees with the business group’s climate change policy.

“We would prefer that the chamber take a more progressive stance on this critical issue and play a constructive role in addressing the climate crisis,” Catherine Novelli, a vice president of government affairs at Apple, wrote in a letter to the business group.

Novelli wrote that Apple resigned its membership in the business group “effective immediately.”

Last month three big power utilities, Exelon Corp, PG&E Corp and PNM Resources Inc, said they were leaving the chamber over the group’s stance on climate…

Bravo!

A rise of at least two meters in the world’s sea levels is now almost unstoppable, experts told a climate conference at Oxford University.

“The crux of the sea level issue is that it starts very slowly but once it gets going it is practically unstoppable,” said Stefan Rahmstorf, a scientist at Germany’s Potsdam Institute and a widely recognized sea level expert. “There is no way I can see to stop this rise, even if we have gone to zero emissions.”

Rahmstorf said the best outcome was that after temperatures stabilized, sea levels would only rise at a steady rate “for centuries to come,” and not accelerate…

His best guess was a one meter rise this century, assuming three degrees warming, and up to five meters over the next 300 years…

Speakers in Oxford used history to back up their arguments on rising seas. Three million years ago the planet was 2-3 degrees warmer and the sea 25-35 meters higher, and 122,000 years ago 2 degrees warmer and 10 meters higher, they said.

“What we now see in Greenland, Antarctica could be a temporary phenomena but it could also be the start of what we saw 122,000 years ago,” said Vellinga…

About 40 million people worldwide live in flood plains, said Southampton University’s Robert Nicholls. That is 0.6 percent of the global population and 5 percent of global wealth, because of valuable assets such as airports and power plants.

The airports and power plants are assets more important to American politicians than, say, healthy or educated citizens.

Two German cargo ships have successfully navigated across Russia’s Arctic-facing northern shore from South Korea to Siberia without the help of icebreakers, the shipping company said.

The two merchant ships belonging to Beluga Shipping Gmbh were able to make the cost-saving voyage by the fabled Northeast Passage because of the reduction in the polar ice cap due to global warming, the company said.

“We are all very proud and delighted to be the first Western shipping company which has successfully transited the legendary Northeast Passage and delivered the sensitive cargo safely through this extraordinarily demanding sea area,” Niels Stolberg, president and CEO of Beluga, said in a statement on the company’s website…

The “Beluga Fraternity” and “Beluga Foresight” left the Russian port of Vladivostok with cargo picked up in July in South Korea, bound for Holland.

They dropped anchor at the Siberian port of Yamburg on Monday, Beluga said.

The Northern Sea Route trims 4,000 nautical miles off the usual 11,000-mile journey via the Suez Canal, which Beluga has said would yield substantial savings in fuel costs and reductions in CO2 emissions…

Maritime life has become exciting again.

New and experimental technology, routes to explore combining dynamic circumstances and historic challenges – great time to go to sea, civilian or military.

Arctic temperatures are now higher than at any time in the last 2,000 years, research reveals. Changes to the Earth’s orbit drove centuries of cooling, but temperatures rose fast in the last 100 years as human greenhouse gas emissions rose…

Writing in the journal Science, they say this confirms that the Arctic is very sensitive both to changes in solar heating and to greenhouse warming.

The 23 sites sampled were good enough to provide a decade-by-decade picture of temperatures across the region…

“The most pervasive signal in the reconstruction, the most prominent trend, is the overall cooling that took place for the first 1,900 years [of the record],” said study leader Darrell Kaufman from Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, US.

“The 20th Century stands out in strong contrast to the cooling that should have continued. The last half-century was the warmest of the 2,000-year temperature record, and the last 10 years have been especially dramatic,” he told BBC News.

Read the rest of this entry »

Trees around the world are colonising new territories in response to higher temperatures. From the US west coast to northern Siberia and south-east Asia, trees are growing at higher elevations, and at higher latitudes as the climate warms…

The shift is revealed by the first global analysis of treelines published in the journal Ecology Letters.

However, the trees aren’t responding quite how scientists expected. Instead of advancing as summer temperatures rise, the trees’ ability to colonise new areas appears to be more dependent on whether winter temperatures warm…

Treelines tend to form wherever conditions for growth become too harsh. For example, at high altitudes and latitudes, the climate often becomes too cold for trees to survive. At this boundary, a treeline occurs, with forest on one side and shorter, hardier plants such as shrubs and plants on the other.

However, around the world, average air temperatures have risen during the past century. This warming has been most pronounced at high altitudes and latitudes, the exact places where treelines form. So in theory, trees should take advantage of these warmer, more hospitable climates, allowing treelines to advance higher and closer towards the poles…

Crucially, the trees do not seem to be responding to warmer summer temperatures. “We expected growing season warming to be the dominant driver,” says Melanie Harsch. “But we found that it was not, winter temperature was.”

RTFA. Been years since I spent a significant portion of my free time at or above treeline. But, I understand what this is all about.

You should, too.