Tag Archives: Global Warming

New Antarctic Glacial Melt Study Slightly Increases IPCC Rate Estimate

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There is a new study by a French/English team looking at the rate at which Antarctic glaciers might contribute to sea level rise, due to global warming, between now and 2100 and 2200 AD.

The study produces several estimates, but suggests that glaciers in Antartica might contribute as much as 30 cm by 2100 and 72 cm by 2200. That is a large amount of sea level rise, but it is actually less than other studies that rely more on paleoclimate evidence have suggested. I personally have something of a bias towards paleo evidence; Good paleo evidence is evidence of what actually happened, suggesting that contradictory results form modeling that does not make direct use of paleo data is suspect.

The new study, by Catherine Ritz, Tamsin Edwards, Gaël Durand, Antony Payne, Vincent Peyaud, and Richard Hindmarsh came out today in Nature, and is called “Potential sea-level rise from Antarctic ice sheet instability constrained by observations.”

The results of this paper raise key IPCC estimates of sea level rise by a tiny bit, which is conservative, as the IPCC estimates are probably low (again, coming from my paleo perspective).

This study looks specifically at marine-ice-sheet instability (MISI). This is the very difficult problem of how ice sheets that are grounded on bedrock sitting below sea level deteriorate. The full-on collapse of such ice sheets has not been directly observed, and it is a very difficult process to model. I liken it to trying to solve the following problem.

An engineer, a theoretical physicist, and a paleoclimatologist are at a wedding. There is a ice large sculpture of a swan on a flat topped table, for decoration. The three start a betting pool on how long it will take for the entire swan, which has already started to melt, to end up on the floor.

The engineer notices some of the meltwater dribbling off the back of the table. She places a set of beer mugs under the streams of water, and records how long it takes for a measured amount of liquid to accumulate. She uses this to generate a graph showing melting over time, estimating the volume of the swan by looking it up in his manual on Ice Sculpture Specifications, and suggests that it will take eleven hours.

The theoretical physicist estimates the volume of ice by assuming a spherical swan, measures the air temperature, and calculates the rate of conversion from ice to water using thermodynamics. He comes up with a different estimate, because the engineer forgot to account for density differences in ice vs water. He estimates that the swan will be entirely the floor in eight and a half hours.

The paleoclimatologist disagrees, and says, “It will take between one and three hours for that swan to be on the floor.”

“Why do you think that, you are clearly an idiot, and I am clearly a physicist, so I must be right!” says the theoretical physicist.

Just as the paleoclimatologist is about to answer, the already melting neck of the swan breaks, and the upper part of the neck and head fall backwards, knocking off one of the large wings. All of those pieces slide off the table and crash on the floor. Off balance, the swan now tips abruptly to one side which causes the second wing to fall off, hitting the main body and pushing it towards the edge of the table. The swan ice sculpture then slid with increasing speed towards the edge of the table, then went over the side, leaving nothing but a large wet spot on the table.

“Because,” the paleoclimatologist says. “Last wedding I went to, that happened.”

I think you get the point.

Ritz, Edwards, et al. try to address the problem by using what they claim to be a better approach to modeling of ice sheet disintegration. From the abstract:

…Physically plausible projections are challenging: numerical models with sufficient spatial resolution to simulate grounding-line processes have been too computationally expensive to generate large ensembles for uncertainty assessment, and lower-resolution model projections rely on parameterizations that are only loosely constrained by present day changes. …Our process- based, statistical approach gives skewed and complex probability distributions … The dependence of sliding on basal friction is a key unknown: nonlinear relationships favour higher contributions. Results are conditional on assessments of MISI risk on the basis of projected triggers under the climate scenario A1B…, although sensitivity to these is limited by theoretical and topographical constraints on the rate and extent of ice loss. We find that contributions are restricted by a combination of these constraints, calibration with success in simulating observed ASE losses, and low assessed risk in some basins.

Nonlinear relationships. That is the swan’s head falling off.

Like another recent paper on Antarctic ice sheets, other studies as well as the paleorecord conflict with the present study enough that this study has to be reviewed carefully before we can assess its contribution to understanding Antarctic ice sheet melting. It may be right, and that would be good news in comparison to some of the higher estimates. However, ice sheet deterioration is very complex, and it is possible that this modeling effort does not account for enough of the important variables, and may not be detailed enough to be reliable. The authors note some of these problems.

It will be interesting to see how other scientists working on this problem respond. I’ll keep you posted.

Low Hanging Fruit: A Very Healthy Diet for The Planet Earth

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Michael Mann has an editorial on Scientific American’s site putting the well known 2.0C limit in perspective for the upcoming climate talks in Paris.

Mann makes a number of important points in his essay (read it here: Meeting a Global Carbon Limit Is Cheaper Than Avoiding One) but there is one point that I want to underscore.

The key factor is that there are technological innovations and economies of scale that emerge only in the course of actually doing something.

Here’s the thing. Let’s say you were suddenly in charge of one trillion dollars of money that could be used to address climate change. What would you spend the money on? Here are some suggestions.

1) Build machines that take CO2 out of the air.

2) Invest in the “next generation” of nuclear reactors.

3) Purchase a huge amount of deforested land and re-forest it.

4) Divide the money up among numerous research groups to develop as yet unknown clean energy technologies that may save us.

All those things are potentially good ideas, and we should probably think about doing all of them at some level. But that is not how you should spend your trillion dollars. The way you should spend your trillion dollars is to underwrite the cost of converting as many homes and businesses as you can to using passive geothermal heating and cooling, and to install photovoltaic on the roofs. Some of the money could also be used to switch internal combustion engines over to electric. Why do these things first? Because they are low hanging fruit. The results would be immediate. A home that uses passive geothermal will use about half, or less, of the fossil carbon for that purpose. A home that has fully deployed PV panels on the roof can cover the electricity for all of that home’s commuting costs and run the heating and cooling system, and a few other things, for much of the year. And so on. As long as our landscape is characterized by buildings with roofs that serve mainly to convert sunlight into heat, we can buy out that sunlight, harness it, and move towards a greater percentage of clean energy very very quickly.

At the same time, of course, we do want to do research on new technologies, perhaps even carbon capture (though I think that should be way down on the list). But there is so much we can do with existing technologies addressing existing needs. As Mann put it, “The obstacle is not a physical one—it is one of political and societal will.”

NASA Reports Astonishing Uptick In Surface Temperature

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We knew October was going to be hot. Only hours ago the Japanese Meteorological Agency came out with their data showing October 2015 to be the hottest October in their database. I’ve not checked yet to see if it was the hottest month in their database. October 2015 was the hottest month in that entire database, which goes back to 1891.

October 2015 was the Warmest Month in the Entire NASA Dabase

Now, NASA GISS, which also keeps track of these things, has come out with their numbers. The predictions from experts like John Abraham indicated that October 2015 might be in the 90s (that’s the anomaly value used by them, and that I use in the graphs here). If the temperature anomaly were to be high enough in the 90s, it would equal or break the record for warmest month ever in the entire direct temperature measurement database.

But it didn’t do that, exactly. Nope. The temperature of the Earth’s surface as measured by thermometers at heat height over land, combined with the sea surface temperature, was not in the 90s. It was 104.

SO, we are one full degree warmer than the NASA baseline, which is NOT the proper pre-industrial baseline. NASA uses 1951-1980 as their baseline, and that includes global warming that has already happened.

So here is the global average temperature anomaly for the entire NASA GISS database expressed as a running 12 month average, though October 2015:

giss_12-month_moving_average

And, here is the NASA GISS surface temperature anomaly for January through October, for all the years in the database, so you can see how 2015 stacks up so far:

giss_FirstMonthsOnly

The graphic at the top of the post is for all the Octobers only. If you want to use any of the graphs somewhere else, consider GOING HERE to get a higher resolution (just click on the graphic at that post and a higher res version will pop up).

Here are the warmest 20 months in the NASA GISS record of monthly temperature anomalies. Note that October 2015 is the warmest, and it beats out the previous warmest month, January ’07, which was during a strong El Nino year:

2015 OCT 104
2007 JAN 97
2010 MAR 93
2002 MAR 91
2015 MAR 90
2014 SEP 89
1998 FEB 88
2015 FEB 87
2010 APR 87
2014 OCT 86
2014 MAY 86
2015 JAN 81
2014 AUG 81
2013 NOV 81
2015 SEP 80
2005 OCT 80
2015 AUG 79
2014 DEC 79
2014 APR 79
2012 OCT 79

(Note that these are temerature anomalies, not temperatures. Boreal summers tend to be the warmest months globally, so the warmest month in actual temperatures is probably June or July. But climate change is tracked with anomalies for obvious reasons.)

Sou at HotWhopper has more, including the graph she makes every month showing surface temperatures in yet another way, HERE.

Andy Skuce has a post discussing October’s temperature reading, with another graph showing temperature anomalies across the months for several years, HERE.

And, R. Stefan Rahmstorf has posted the following graph here and here, for yet another look.
CT-egYtUwAAcDzC

Eli Rabett has taken Rahmstorf’s graphs for the last several months and turned them into a moving GIF, HERE.

Global Warming: Record Breaking October Heat

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The Earth’s surface is warming primarily because of human generated greenhouse gasses, mainly CO2, being added to the atmosphere. Several agencies and organizations track this by combining data from surface thermometers and sea surface temperature measurements. The Japan Meteorological Agency is one such group, and they have just released their updated monthly data for October.

The graph above shows the average surface temerature for the month of October for the entire period of their data set (1891 to the present). Not only is October 2015 the warmest October observed, but it is way warmer than previous Octobers.

This isn’t the biggest jump observed. If you look at the earlier data, you can see other jumps of simlar (or in one or two cases, greater) magnitude. These, including this year, are all En Niños. During an El Niño, heat that has been stored up for the previous several years in the Pacific Ocean is released because of temporary changes in sea currents and trade winds.

Here is the important thing to note about this set of data. The present El Niño is a big one. But several of the earlier El Niños were also big ones. But with each big El Niño, we see an increase in temperatures over the previous El Niños. Keep this in mind when the following two things are brought to your attention: 1) We are breaking all sorts of records with tropical storms, heat waves, and other dangerous weather, but 2) this is expected since it is an El Niño year.

The breaking of numerous records in not expected in an El Niño year. For many of these observations, we do expect to be more likely to break a record during any given El Niño, but records would also be broken, and set for the long term, during an earlier strong El Niño. But, with global surface temperatures marching ever upwards, a year like the present one is likely to break even those older El Niño enhanced records, because of global warming.

The present El Niño is expected to last into next year.

Over the coming days some of the other agencies that track global warming will come out with their data for October. Stay tuned.

Rates Of Climate Change Potentially Very High

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There is a new study out that indicates that the rate at which climate change could occur is much higher than previously known or assumed.

Those of us who study actual (historical) evolution, looking at fossils and geological layers and such, have always known that the possible rates of change in earth systems and biological systems are much higher than what we can estimate by looking at the present day. There are two reasons for this. One is a glitch in the uniformitarianism principle, the idea that processes in the past must have been the same as processes we observe today. The glitch has to so with bias. Rare events, which likely include rapid change, are rarely observed, and the time range over which scientists have been observing and recording things is too short to have seen very many such events. So, in effect, processes in the past may have features that we do not observe today, not because they can’t happen today but because they are rare and we’ve only been closely watching for a few generations.

The second reason is that we happen to have been, until recently, living in a period of less rapid change because of the nature of the Earth’s climate. Consider living on the Nullarbor Plain of southern Australia during the end of the last glacial, when sea level rise was very rapid for a few thousand years. This is one of the flattest places on earth, and is divided into two parts. The upper part makes up part of modern Australia’s landscape, but the lower part rests beneath the sea. It is very likely that even moderately fast sea level rise on that lower plain, which was exposed during the last glacial maximum, would have been noticed by anyone living there (and there were people living there). The most rapid sea level rise across an essentially flat region may have even been catastrophic. The tide goes in. It does not go out. Take a trip inland to hunt some kangaroo because you are tire of seafood, and the sea follows you. Since we don’t see such events today, we have a hard time relating to them, and in particular, we have a hard time estimating just how fast they can happen.

Meanwhile, the fossil record of both species (newly evolved, newly extinct, or just moved in or out of a region) and ecological conditions tends to show a lot of abrupt change. We assume most of that abruptness is because the readable geological record is formed during certain periods of time, and during other times, things that happen are not recorded. We are less likely to spot a period of change in the geological record than a period of stasis. Add to this the fact that many geological columns are broken up by disconformities, periods where the record that may have been of some change or another is simply eroded away. From these effects we get a geological record that tends to show abrupt change but that only rarely means abrupt change actually happened.

There may be yet another factor. Rapid change may simply leave little evidence. Slower change may accumulate clearer evidence. The degree to which this happens may depend a great deal on the kind of change involved.

The upshot of the new research is to confirm that change in the past sometimes happens more quickly than we can know from our current experience. Also the research attempts to estimate the rate of some past changes, looking specifically at global surface temperature change. The logic is pretty straight forward. Imagine you want to know how many people per 10 minute time slice enter a shopping mall. You count the number of people in the mall every hour from 8:00 opening time to noon. You then estimate the rate by dividing the increase in number of people per hour by six. But what if a particular store opened at 10:30 and had a big sale that day? Well, your estimate for the 10:00 to 11:00 period would be higher than the rest of the hours. But isn’t it true that a lot of people would show up for the sale right around 10:30? To get a better estimate, you need to make more observations, say every 20 minutes. The 20 minute period including 10:30 would yield a number, divided by 2, that would be higher than the hour-long data divided by 6. From the paper:

The scaling relationship predicts that for every 10-fold increase in measurement timespan, there is an approximately 8-fold decrease in the recorded rate of temperature change. The logical explanation for this scaling is that climate change does not proceed in a linear, monotonic manner, but is instead characterized by transient stasis and reversals, even during episodes of extreme warming. Similar explanations have been put forward for observed timespan-dependent scaling in other Earth system processes, notably sedimentation rates16 and evolution. Geological temperature changes defined at typically centennial to multimillennial timespans cannot capture the full variance of the climate system operative at shorter timescales; aliasing variability that is readily apparent from higher resolution and more recent records.

The paper draws two conclusions that could be regarded as good news, though not really. First, when we look at modern rapid global warming, and say, “look, this is happening faster than anything in the past,” we ma be overstating the case. Past temperature change could have been faster than we were thinking. Second, when we look at future likely rapid climate (and related ecological) change, and say “this rapid change will be bad for species,” we may be overstating the case. Past rapid change probably happened, so species must be adapted to rapid change.

Unfortunately, it does not work that way. We know that pretty much every ecosystem we examine over long periods of time involves repeated and significant disturbance and turnover. Also, we know from evolutionary theory and observation that species do not adapt to rapid change that happens now and then. There is no known mechanism for that adaptation to occur. So, unfortunately, these implications of the research are invalid. Rapid change has always been bad, and in the future, nothing is going to change that.

This research does show us something very important. How fast global surface temperatures can rise is not well known. We see very rapid increases in temperature (and sea level rise) now and then, but there are also decreases now and then. The forces that increase temperature and decrease temperature are always playing against each other, with the trend for many decades now being that the increases outweigh the decreases. But just how fast can change happen if, say, the forces that increase surface temperature get a few decades without mitigation from the opposing forces? This recent paper may indicate that very rapid change, much more rapid than we see now, could happen. I personally think this difference in observed rate of change and possible rate of change is more important with ice sheet melting and deterioration than it is with temperature. We might be thinking of a few feet of see level rise over several decades as likely, but this research could indicate that while that might be the total final effect, the paleorecord does not rule out that a large amount of that change may happen in just short segment of that multi-decade horizon.

David B. Kemp, Kilian Eichenseer & Wolfgang Kiessling. 2015Maximum rates of climate change are systematically underestimated in the geological record. Nature Communications.

Big Climate Change Data Gets Musical

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Scientists and journalists constantly look for fresh ways to communicate the impacts of climate change. Visualisation of data is now well-known and widely practised. But a new project is doing something a little out of the ordinary: it’s turning climate data into sound.

The idea behind ‘Climate symphony’ is to translate hard data on climate change into a musical composition that engages the public — encouraging people to question their feelings and the stories behind the data, and create a conversation.

In this audio interview we speak to Katharine Round and Leah Borromeo of Disobedient Film Company, the co-creators of the work, alongside composer Jamie Perera. They explain that, by listening to the climate symphony, people will be able to tangibly experience climate data and immerse themselves in it. Research shows that sound touches us in inexplicable ways. By using music, the hope is to create an emotional response to something that for many might look meaningless on a page. “In a world where we’re saturated with hearing the same messages,” they say, “any way to engage people with a subject [as] important [as] climate change is worthwhile.”

The story is here.

And, here is the interview.

Hat Tip: Digital Rabbit

Evidence of high climate sensitivity

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I’m not going to say anything about this research because I’ve not read the paper, but it looks important. If someone out there writes something up I’ll put a link here.

Here’s the deal. Climate sensitivity is, very oversimplified, how much the surface of the planet heats up as we add CO2 and other greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere. More specifically, equilibrium climate sensitivity is the number of degrees C the atmosphere at face height and the sea surface heat up with a doubling of CO2 from pre-industrial levels.

If our atmosphere had just nitrogen and CO2 and that’s it, the number would be fairly low, about 1.2 degrees C. But live would not exist here because there would be no water, so we would not be having this conversation. The fact that we are having this conversations suggests the existence of water vapor, which cranks up sensitivity quite a bit, because more CO2 means more heat means more water vapor. That is just one of a number of “positive” (read not good) feedbacks on climate sensitivity.

I’ve noted before that if you offer a group of informed climate scientist the chance to guess a single number for climate sensitivity, using the Free Beer method, is something like 3.0. Certainly not less than 2.0. But it could just possibly be much higher, like 6. The chances of climate sensitivity being 6 are small, and if it turned out to be, then we are truly Doomed. But here’s the thing. The upper range of possible values for this important number is what is sometimes called a “fat tail.” The chances are low, but not so low they can be ignored.

Here’s a picture of a fat tail.

uncertainty_sensitivity

Even a value of 4 or 5 would be bad, and the chances are not vanishingly small that this would be the value.

So, about the latest research.

Title: Long-term cloud change imprinted in seasonal cloud variation: More evidence of high climate sensitivity

Authors: Chengxing Zhai, Jonathan H. Jiang, Hui Su

Abstract: The large spread of model equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) is mainly caused by the differences in the simulated marine boundary layer cloud (MBLC) radiative feedback. We examine the variations of MBLC fraction in response to the changes of sea surface temperature (SST) at seasonal and centennial time scales for 27 climate models that participated in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 3 and phase 5. We find that the intermodel spread in the seasonal variation of MBLC fraction with SST is strongly correlated with the intermodel spread in the centennial MBLC fraction change per degree of SST warming and that both are well correlated with ECS. Seven models that are consistent with the observed seasonal variation of MBLC fraction with SST at a rate ?1.28?±?0.56%/K all have ECS higher than the multimodel mean of 3.3?K yielding an ensemble-mean ECS of 3.9?K and a standard deviation of 0.45?K.

Potential meaning: Ruh roh.

These results are not particularly unexpected. But one would hope that more research would show a lower number, because we really don’t want this to be a higher number.

See also: Future warming likely to be on high side of climate projections, analysis finds, which covers A Less Cloudy Future: The Role of Subtropical Subsidence in Climate Sensitivity, by John Fasullo and Kevin Trenberth. Science, 9 November 2012:

An observable constraint on climate sensitivity, based on variations in mid-tropospheric relative humidity (RH) and their impact on clouds, is proposed. We show that the tropics and subtropics are linked by teleconnections that induce seasonal RH variations that relate strongly to albedo (via clouds), and that this covariability is mimicked in a warming climate. A present-day analog for future trends is thus identified whereby the intensity of subtropical dry zones in models associated with the boreal monsoon is strongly linked to projected cloud trends, reflected solar radiation, and model sensitivity. Many models, particularly those with low climate sensitivity, fail to adequately resolve these teleconnections and hence are identifiably biased. Improving model fidelity in matching observed variations provides a viable path forward for better predicting future climate.

See also: A bit more sensitive, which discusses “Spread in model climate sensitivity traced to atmospheric convective mixing” by Stgeven Sherwood, Sandrine Bony, and Jean-Louis Dufrense, in Nature, January 2 2014.

Equilibrium climate sensitivity refers to the ultimate change in global mean temperature in response to a change in external forcing. Despite decades of research attempting to narrow uncertainties, equilibrium climate sensitivity estimates from climate models still span roughly 1.5 to 5 degrees Celsius for a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, precluding accurate projections of future climate. The spread arises largely from differences in the feedback from low clouds, for reasons not yet understood. Here we show that differences in the simulated strength of convective mixing between the lower and middle tropical troposphere explain about half of the variance in climate sensitivity estimated by 43 climate models. The apparent mechanism is that such mixing dehydrates the low-cloud layer at a rate that increases as the climate warms, and this rate of increase depends on the initial mixing strength, linking the mixing to cloud feedback. The mixing inferred from observations appears to be sufficiently strong to imply a climate sensitivity of more than 3 degrees for a doubling of carbon dioxide. This is significantly higher than the currently accepted lower bound of 1.5 degrees, thereby constraining model projections towards relatively severe future warming.

See also: Overlooked evidence – global warming may proceed faster than expected

Academics to world leaders: stop global warming

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The following is reposed from here.

More than 1,500 academics from around the world have signed an <a href="http://globalclimatechangeweek.com/open-letter/">open letter</a> asking world leaders and delegates to the upcoming United Nations Climate Conference in Paris to take vigorous action now in order to avoid a future of catastrophic global warming.


The letter was initiated by Lawrence Torcello, an assistant professor of philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology, in conjunction with Australian philosopher Keith Horton, and other colleagues in Australia.


&#8220;I am passionate about the topic. This is the moral issue of our time and the greatest challenge humanity has yet faced,&#8221; Torcello said.


Signatories include climate scientist <a href="http://www.meteo.psu.edu/holocene/public_html/Mann/index.php">Michael E. Mann</a>, environmentalist <a href="http://www.billmckibben.com/">Bill McKibben,</a> and philosophers <a href="http://chomsky.info/">Noam Chomsky</a> and <a href="https://www.princeton.edu/~psinger/">Peter Singer</a>.


Support for the letter is being sought until Nov. 30, when the conference begins.


&#8220;The leaders of the industrialized world shoulder a grave responsibility for the consequences of our current and past carbon emissions,&#8221; the letter says.


&#8220;We undersigned concerned academics, researchers and scientists from around the world recognize the seriousness of our environmental situation and the special responsibility we owe to our communities, future generations and our fellow species,&#8221; the letter continues. &#8220;We will strive to meet that responsibility in our educational and communicative endeavors. We call upon our leaders to do what is necessary to prevent catastrophic climate change. With just as much urgency, we call upon our fellow citizens to hold their leaders responsible for vigorously addressing global warming.&#8221;


The letter warns of catastrophic climate change unless vigorous preventative measures are taken now, and points out that the current pledges being made by world leaders ahead of the Paris conference are not enough to prevent dangerous levels of global warning even if met.


&#8220;This letter makes a clear statement that acting aggressively now to prevent catastrophic global warming is the ethical responsibility of our global leaders, and that citizens must hold them accountable,&#8221; Torcello said. &#8220;The letter&#8217;s message has been widely embraced by professional ethicists and philosophers worldwide.&#8221;


He said scientists agree that a limit of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial levels (between the years 1750 and 1849) is the maximum temperature limit we can risk to avoid catastrophic climate change. Vigorous actions are necessary immediately to avoid that threshold.


As of now, the world&#8217;s global temperature has increased 1.6 degrees since preindustrial levels. If it were possible to stop emitting all greenhouse gases today, the world would continue to warm another 1.1 degrees before stabilizing, Torcello said.


If no change is made, that 3.6-degree average increase will occur around 2036. Already, as glacial ice continues to melt, another three to six feet of sea level rise will displace millions of people by the end of this century, he said.


Climate change will contribute to more frequent heat waves, wildfires, droughts, crop failures and related loss of life, he said, while expanding the range of agricultural pests and tropical diseases.


Torcello said the <a href="http://globalclimatechangeweek.com/open-letter/">letter</a> will remain open for endorsement for academics to sign through the end of November.

NASA Study of Antarctic Ice Melt Misunderstood

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A recent study that is getting a lot of press suggests that the massive ice sheets of Antarctica are on average growing rather than shrinking, and thus, not contributing to sea level rise. (The authors of the study warn that this will reverse in the near future with global warming.) However, there is reason to believe that these conclusions are incorrect.

Antarctica is the sleeping giant of climate change. Human activity, mainly the release of greenhouse gasses from burning fossil fuels, has been changing the climate rather dramatically for the last few decades, and the consequences of this change are mostly negative. Failed agricultural systems have led to failed states and regional political instability. Dramatic changes in weather patterns, including droughts in Australia and California, a series of unprecedented tropical storms over the last several years, major flooding (if anyone from Texas is reading this, nice to know you have internet access in your tree), all have a global warming contribution, because weather is climate and climate is changed and changing. But sea level rise, while mostly a thing of the future rather than the present, may have the biggest effect of all, at least on land. As we warm the planet, the polar ice sheets will contribute much of their ice to the sea, and based on what we know of the past, direct measurements over the last 20 years or so, and from models of the medium term future, this could mean an increase in sea level of several meters. The best available science currently suggests that by the end of the century average sea levels could be about a meter higher than they are now. It would not be unreasonable to regard that as a conservative estimate.

I’d like to take a moment and point out an important aspect of the sea which people, especially those that don’t live on the sea, forget. The average altitude of the sea at a particular point along the shore is not the part you have to worry about. Well, that is important, but it is not the part that bites. Consider the cobra snake. A cape cobra can strike at a distance well over half its own body length. So if you are standing ten feet away from a fifteen foot long cobra, the snake might seem a safe distance away, but you are actually within its striking range. One could say that the sea has two overlapping but distinct distances at which it strikes. One is the normal storm range. If you raise the sea along a beach in Cape Cod by six inches, nothing interesting happens most days. But the dozen or so medium size storms that will occur over a year (especially in winter when the storms come in from the Atlantic) will convert that foot of elevation into several horizontal feet of beach erosion, in a very short amount of time. The second is what happens when more serious storms, like tropical cyclones or their extratropical spawn, come along. New York City was built and reinforced from the sea, over time, mainly when the Atlantic was about a foot lower than it is now. A couple of years ago, when Super Storm Sandy came along, the storm gathered up that extra foot of sea level and turned it into an extra large storm surge sufficient to flood the subway system in lower Manhattan. Long before the sea in that area rises another three feet, there will be the occasional storm surge that will be even more severe.

Since a large percentage of the world’s population, a large percentage of the world’s agricultural activity, and an even larger percentage (probably) of the world’s real estate value will become subject to flooding, sometimes severe, and eventually be replaced by the rising sea over the next century and beyond, sea level rise is a very important phenomenon.

You have probably already heard about the study, “Mass gains of the Antarctic ice sheet exceed losses” by H. Jay Zwally and others (see citation and abstract below), that came out a couple of weeks ago telling us that the contribution to sea level rise by the Antarctic is currently zero or negative. Or at least, that is how many press outlets are reporting the story.

There are two problems with this study that you need to know about. First, the study examines a data set that ends in 2008. The second problem is that there are indicators that the study is simply wrong, even though it likely has significant merits.

The last decade of research on Antarctica have shown, in many studies using a variety of techniques, that Antarctica is contributing to sea level rise. They have also shown that the rate of melting in Antarctic is probably increasing. Even more importantly, they have indicated that certain areas of Antarctic are current in a state of instability, suggesting that the rate of contribution of the southern continent’s ice mass to sea level rise may increase abruptly in the near future.

The fact that the study being reported uses older data could explain why it conflicts with everything else the science is telling us. Michael Mann, quoted in The Guardian, notes, “…the claims are based on seven-year-old data, and so cannot address the finding that Antarctic ice loss has accelerated in more recent years.” To this I’ll add that it is somewhat annoying that those reporting the story, including, oddly, the authors of the study, are using forms of the word “current” to describe the result. These results are old, out dated, and while potentially valuable, a data set ending in 2008, when speaking of a rapidly changing system, is not current.

Sou at HotWhopper has a nice graphic showing estimates of Antarctic ice melt before and after 2008, strongly indicating the problem with using a study from older date to understand current conditions.

Average global sea level is a measurable verifiable established fact, and the contribution of major ice sheets to this has been measured and found to be important. If the study is correct, and Antarctica was not contributing to sea level rise during that period prior to 2008, then something is terribly wrong. There is simply not enough wiggle room in the other sources of sea level rise to account for the missing volume of water. One could argue that a beautiful hypothesis (positive mass balance in Antarctic ice) has been killed by an ugly fact (actual observed sea level rise). But Zwally’s study does not present a mere hypothesis, but rather, is based on detailed observations incorporated into a set of carefully done calculations.

So, perhaps the observations are wrong. There may be two reasons the observations (and the calculations derived from them) are wrong. One is simply that the satellite data they use are inherently less accurate than needed. The measurements are of a very small change over time over a very large area. If the satellite method is just a little off, this could cause a problem. (By the way, the data end in 2008 because the instrumentation on the satellite stopped working then.) This study’s main contribution may, in the end, to be to point out a problem with the instrumentation prior to that time. This doesn’t seem that likely for the simple reason that the whole point of putting fancy instruments in a bird is to get super accurate information.

The second possible reason seems more likely. Part of the process of determining that Antarctica has a positive mass balance (more ice over time rather than less) involves assumptions (and some measurements) about the response of the bedrock underneath the very thick ice sheets. If that is wrong, then that is a problem.

Since the sea level has in fact been going up, and there is no easy way to account for that than a certain contribution to Antarctica, and all the other science shows an increasingly melting Antarctic, and the study uses older data, then I’m afraid I have bad news. Sea level is still going up, Antarctica is still contributing to it, and the amount of this contribution is still, as the science has been suggesting for several years no, only going to increase.

The following resources will be of interest to anyone following this story.

  • Goldberg, Suzanne. 2014. Western Antarctic ice sheet collapse has already begun, scientists warn. (The Guardian)
  • Lewis, Renee. 2014. West Antarctic ice melt is now ‘unstoppable,” NASA report says. (Al Jazeera report)
  • Lewis, Renee. 2015 Experts dispute NASA study showing Antarctic ice gain. (Al Jazeera report)
  • Plait, Phil. 2015. Is Antarctica Gaining or Losing Ice? Hit: Losing. (Slate)
  • Sea Level Rise Research Group. 2015 global mean sea level time series. (data site)
  • Sinclair, Peter. 2015. Keeping it simple on sea level rise. (Blog post)
  • Sou. 2015. Antarctic ice – growing or shrinking? NASA vs Princeton and Leeds etc. (Hot Whopper)

    • The original paper is here.

    Citation:

    Zwally, H. Jay, 2; Li, Jun; Robbins, John W.; Saba, Jack L.; Yi, Donghui; Brenner, Anita C. 2015. Mass gains of the Antarctic ice sheet exceed losses. Journal of Glaciology, International Glaciological Society.

    Abstract:

    Mass changes of the Antarctic ice sheet impact sea-level rise as climate changes, but recent rates have been uncertain. Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) data (2003–08) show mass gains from snow accumulation exceeded discharge losses by 82?±?25?Gt?a–1, reducing global sea-level rise by 0.23?mm?a–1. European Remote-sensing Satellite (ERS) data (1992–2001) give a similar gain of 112?±?61?Gt?a–1. Gains of 136?Gt?a–1 in East Antarctica (EA) and 72?Gt?a–1 in four drainage systems (WA2) in West Antarctic (WA) exceed losses of 97?Gt?a–1 from three coastal drainage systems (WA1) and 29?Gt?a–1 from the Antarctic Peninsula (AP). EA dynamic thickening of 147?Gt?a–1 is a continuing response to increased accumulation (>50%) since the early Holocene. Recent accumulation loss of 11?Gt?a–1 in EA indicates thickening is not from contemporaneous snowfall increases. Similarly, the WA2 gain is mainly (60?Gt?a–1) dynamic thickening. In WA1 and the AP, increased losses of 66?±?16?Gt?a–1 from increased dynamic thinning from accelerating glaciers are 50% offset by greater WA snowfall. The decadal increase in dynamic thinning in WA1 and the AP is approximately one-third of the long-term dynamic thickening in EA and WA2, which should buffer additional dynamic thinning for decades.

    Protection of Climate Scientists Against Harassment

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    It is the fourth quarter, the team you hate (perhaps the Green Bay Packers) have been winning the whole time, but over the last few minutes your team has scored enough points to be just barely ahead. And, you have the momentum. The other team has many key players out with injuries, your players are really clicking, and all the stats have turned your way. Nothing is assured, but you are likely to win this game (may be you are the Vikings, so this is an extreme event).

    But the other team (hey, let’s change them from the Green Bay Packers to the New Orleans Saints) is starting to play dirty. The referees are blind (maybe they’ve been paid off?) and are not seeing many of the obvious penalties, and their defense is trying really hard to injure your quarterback.

    That was a metaphor. The following is an important press release from the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.

    Yesterday, CSLDF filed a brief as amicus curiae, or “friend of the court,” urging the Arizona Court of Appeals to protect climate scientists’ files from invasive open records requests. CSLDF filed its brief in support of the Arizona Board of Regents, which has defended the records of two University of Arizona climate scientists from massive and harassing open records requests by the Energy & Environment Legal Institute (E&E Legal).

    E&E Legal, as detailed further in our brief (available here), touts its mission as “free-market environmentalism through strategic litigation” and a key part of its strategy has been repeatedly misusing open records laws to go after huge swaths of climate scientists’ records. Its work has been described as “filing nuisance suits to disrupt important academic research”[1] as part of an aim to convince “the public to believe human-caused global warming is a scientific fraud.”[2]

    In this case, E&E Legal claims that Arizona state open records laws entitle it to virtually unfettered access to two U of A professors’ files, and it has sought an astonishing 13 years of emails and other documents from both Dr. Malcolm Hughes and Dr. Jonathan Overpeck – 26 years of records in total. E&E Legal claims it needs these records because it is conducting a “transparency project,” and it has argued that these two researchers were somehow part of a “scientific-technological elite” that has “successfully corrupted public policy” with respect to “climate alarmism.”[3]

    The University of Arizona turned over some records to E&E Legal, and litigated to withhold others. A March 2015 trial court decision validated the University’s decision to deny large portions of E&E Legal’s requests. (You can read more about the trial court decision here.)

    CSLDF’s October 26th amicus brief asks the Arizona Court of Appeals, Division II, to uphold the trial court’s decision and protect climate scientists’ private correspondence and other records against E&E Legal’s intrusive requests. As described in our brief, E&E Legal’s requests are “part of a broader strategy of attacking individual scientists as a way to try to discredit theories or even entire fields of study.”[4] We agree with the Arizona Board of Regents, which argued before the trial court that these requests seek ultimately “to attack [researchers’] science, criticize their interactions with each other and publicly assault how they speak about or defend themselves against the increasingly small group of outliers who continue to deny man’s role in global climate change.”[5]

    Unfortunately, abusive open records requests on publicly funded scientists have been an increasingly prominent method of using the legal system to attack climate scientists. Open records laws, namely the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) or state equivalents, are intended to serve the public good and provide transparency on government decision-making by allowing citizens to request copies of administrative records – but open records laws can also be twisted into a tool for harassment of publicly funded scientists, such as those employed by the government or public universities.[6] Climate scientists in particular have been regularly subjected to attacks via abuse of open records laws, by E&E Legal and other ideologically motivated groups. In addition to the Arizona requests currently in litigation, E&E Legal has also filed similar open records requests in, at least, Alabama, Delaware, Illinois, Texas, Virginia, and Washington, D.C.[7]

    In fact, CSLDF’s initial project was to generate funding and publicity for the defense of Dr. Michael Mann, who was on the receiving end of several invasive open records requests from E&E Legal. E&E Legal – then named the American Tradition Institute – sought massive numbers of emails and other documents that Dr. Mann had written or received over the course of six years of employment at the University of Virginia. After years of legal battling, the Virginia Supreme Court ultimately agreed in 2014 that the state’s open records protections included protecting research and academic “free thought and expression.”

    But defeat in Virginia hardly slowed E&E Legal down, because “while they lose repeatedly, in one way they are successful: they confuse the public debate, and force universities and scientists to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars defending themselves.”[8] There is also a substantial time element – in Arizona, Dr. Hughes and Dr. Overpeck spent ten weeks and six weeks, respectively, culling and reviewing emails potentially responsive to E&E Legal’s requests.

    Consequently, CSLDF has asked the Arizona Court of Appeals not only to affirm the trial court’s ruling but also “to make clear that, in the absence of a showing of exceptional circumstances, certain documents related to research are exempt from disclosure under the Arizona Public Records Law.” In particular, we believe that, unless there are extreme circumstances or potential conflicts of interest at play, “prepublication drafts, editorial comments, peer reviews, email (between and among researchers, co-authors, reviewers and other collaborators), unfinished or inactive research, and unused data” should be presumptively protected. ”Confidentiality must of course be balanced against the societal goods that traditionally justify public-record laws; CSLDF does not believe the presumptive exemptions it asks the Court to adopt will impede any appropriate use of the Arizona Public Records Law.”[9]

    CSLDF is committed to protecting the scientific endeavor, and it is fighting back against legal attacks on climate scientists. We hope the Arizona Court of Appeals upholds the trial court decision, and implements protections to help prevent future attacks on public researchers. The best climate science needs climate scientists who can do their work free of harassment.

    Many thanks to our wonderful legal team at Mayer Brown and Osborn Maledon for all their help.

    To here to see the version with the footnotes.

    Go HERE to donate to the fund.

    Climate Change is Real, and Important, David Siegel

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    A week or so ago, I got a couple of emails and tweets about a blog post on Medium.com, an internet thing of which I had never heard. Apparently Medium.com is a big giant blog that anybody can go and blog their big giant thoughts on: like tumblr, but more bloggy.

    Anyway, some dude by the name of David Siegel, Web Page Designer, posted a really long blog post about climate change on medium.com.

    Have you ever been poking around on the Intertoobs, when somebody comes along and says, “Hey, I never really thought about global warming/vaccination/evolution before, but suddenly and unexplainably I am now. And as I think about global warming/vaccination/evolution these innocent and valid questions arise and imma ask you about them.”

    Then the conversation proceeds to go down hill. The individual was really an anti-vaxer, a creationist, or a climate change denier all along, but was just pretending to be a thoughtful person who never thought about this issue before and just has some innocent question.

    But every single one of these questions is framed in terms of the anti or denial perspective, every “fact” noted and eventually adhered to is a discredited anti or denial meme, and even more amusingly, every statement made by this “innocent, curious” individual is the same exact statement made the last time a similar individual came along.

    David Siegel is one of those individuals, only instead of showing up on a Facebook thread or in the comments section of a blog post, he went to medium.com where anybody can post their thoughts. He wrote a long and detailed post, the sort of effort one would normally be paid to write by an interested party or editor, that had many of the standard misrepresentations of science found in the denialist septic system. It is well done but essentially evil, because climate change truly is real and important. I do wonder what motivates a person like David Siegel to do something like this. He is clearly intelligent, and an intelligent person has to know when they are misrepresenting the science so badly, even if they don’t understand the science itself.

    At first I chose to Ignore Siegel’s post because it was just another denier screed. But a couple of colleagues who are scientists or science writers also noted Siegel’s post, and we discussed it, and realized that this batch of anti-science rhetoric was making the rounds, being taken somewhat seriously by the gullible or politically susceptible.

    So we decided to write up a response. And, it is a good response, including discussion of, and references for, a number of key issues in climate change science. It is the kind of post one might want to keep handy and point out to people like Siegel, but with less time on their hands, when they show up on your facebook page or blog post.

    The effort was lead by Miriam O’Brien, and she put a lot of work into it. The other authors include Josh Halpern, Collin Maessen, Ken Rice, and Michael Tobis. Josh is aka Eli Rabett, blogging at Rabett Run. Collin writes at Real Skeptic. Miriam is, of course, Sou at HotWhopper. Ken Rice is known on the internet as …and Then There’s Physics. Michael Tobis plays himself and blogs at Planet 3.0 and Only In It For The Bold. I, of course, blog here.

    You can find links to all of those blogs at on the post itself.

    So, click through and read our stuff!

    Honey, We Broke The Global Warming Graph. Again.

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    We’re gonna need a bigger boat. Well, actually we’re gonna need a bigger y-Axis. This has been happening for a while.

    NOAA has just published September’s global surface temperature, which turns out to be 0.90C above their baseline (20th century average). According to NOAA, this is the highest value for September on record, 0.19C higher than last year, which was also a record. The graph above shows the year to date average, though September, for NOAA’s entire data set.

    Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist at the University of Reading, recently tweeted a graph he produced to show global surface temperatures since 1850, noting that 2015 year to date broke his graph.

    CR6sVb2WIAEbV0v (1)

    Using NASA GISS data, climate scientist John Abraham broke his graph too:

    GISTEMP LOTI through September 2015-1

    Using the NOAA data, I made the following chart, showing annual surface temperature measurements for their entire record through 2014. Then, I added an estimate for 2015, based on year to date numbers.

    Screen Shot 2015-10-22 at 9.51.57 AM

    Broke the graph again.

    Changing Opinions on Energy and Climate Change

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    The University of Texas Energy Poll tracks Americans’ opinions on energy and climate change related issues. You can see the results of the latest iteration of the poll here.

    Opinions are changing.

    Respondents are stressing less about energy prices and instead are worried more about environmental costs. Almost half are willing to pay higher prices to protect the environment — nine points higher than in the last poll. Thirty-four percent are unwilling.

    Most striking are their attitudes on global climate change. It’s occurring, say 76 percent — a surge of 6 points in six months and 11 points since the poll began. And although there’s still a wide gap between Democrats and Republicans, more than half of Republicans now agree climate change is real.

    Such a shift probably has multiple causes, says Kirshenbaum, and the poll hints at several — starting with extreme weather. This past summer was warmer than usual, according to 54 percent of respondents, and water conservation has become a priority for 78 percent.

    “The West Coast has seen both wildfires and severe drought,” she says. “Regardless of where people are politically, they may be recognizing that something is different right now.”

    Significantly, 65 percent of those polled see reducing carbon emissions as a top priority in ranking candidates’ energy policy.
    UT_EnergyPollParty

    (More charts here.)

    The Consensus Gap, the difference between the nearly 100% scientific consensus that climate change is real and the public view on that question, is closing, it is mainly caused by Republicans (not Democrats), and even among Republicans, the gap is reducing.

    TexasEnergyPollCR2HQGOUEAA53GA

    September Was Warm: 2015 Is Warm

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    A few days ago, NASA released it’s GISS TEMP global surface temperature data showing that in that data set September was warm, with the same value as August (which was also warm). At least one science denier has told me that the fact that August and September were the same means that global warming was not real. What an idiot.

    Anyway, it does depend on what data set you look at. If you look at ALL the data sets together on the same graph and stand back even a short distance you will see that they are all about the same. Global warming is real no matter how you measure it. But when we look at details we see some differences.

    The venerable Japan Meteorological Agency has now released their data. Their data shows a huge increase in temperature globally for September, making it the warmest September on record.

    JMA_Global_Surface_Temp_SEPTEMBER_ONLY

    This difference (between JMA and NASA GISS) is probably because the Japanese data reflect the effects of the ongoing El Nino more directly in the data set.

    For the record, here are the JMA for annual global surface temperatures values over the entire record.

    JMA_Global_Surface_Temperature

    The annual value for 2015 is estimated by me by simply taking the average of all the months so far, though September. Normally that would be a reasonable estimate of global temperatures (there is not a huge seasonal variation across the year). However, this year, I’m confident this is a low-ball estimate. All indications are that October will be warmer than September in all the data sets, and since El Nino is cooking along nicely, the rest of the year (and the beginning of next year) may be extra warm as well.