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What World Under Climate Change

Free episodes:

Climate change is already having an impact on western states (in the US). Droughts are made worse by declining snowpacks and higher temperatures. (The prognostication for 2030 - just 15 years away - is not good). The recreation and agriculture industries are threatened, and water supplies are at risk. According to an analysis of U.S. Forest Service data, wildfire season is two and a half months longer than it was several decades ago -- and in some places, wildfires can now happen all year round.

Anecdotally, we are currently experiencing very warm, summer-like temperatures in LA. Today was warm - and thankfully not humid - proving the following infographic - that we here in California and the Southwest generally are losing our spring season. (We have just had a very erratic winter season). The interactive map in the link is very cool - just hover over a state and you get your answer (if you don't want to use the very obvious color coding ;) ).

THE SEASON OF THE SWITCH: What time of year is getting warmer the fastest in your state?
LINK: Infographic: What’s the fastest-warming season in your state?

TEXT: "Global warming, by its very name, spares no one—but that’s not to say that it’s heating things up uniformly. As the above infographic shows, the rate and timing of warming can vary from region to region, even from one state to the next. It basically comes down to how temperature variations interact with an area’s given landscape and weather patterns.

"Nationally, all four seasons have been getting hotter since the 1970s—but certain parts of the country are feeling it hardest in either spring, summer, fall, or winter. For most of the 50 states, winter is getting super melty (did you hear that, Senator Inhofe?). Spring is extra toasty in the Southwest, while the Pacific Northwest has had some sweaty falls. In Texas alone, summer is warming fastest (The Lone Star State is like a whole other country, after all—a very hot, dry country). "
 
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We could radically cut fossil fuel emissions and shift to renewable energy. So why don’t we?
LINK: We could radically cut carbon pollution and shift to renewables. So why don’t we?

TEXT: "My mind keeps coming back to the question: What is wrong with us? I think the answer is far more simple than many have led us to believe: we have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, the reigning ideology for the entire period we have been struggling to find a way out of this crisis.

"We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe—and would benefit the vast majority—are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets. That problem might not have been insurmountable had it presented itself at another point in our history. But it is our great collective misfortune that the scientific community made its decisive diagnosis of the climate threat at the precise moment when those elites were enjoying more unfettered political, cultural, and intellectual power than at any point since the 1920s."


From “How Everything Will Change Under Climate Change,” Naomi Klein’sGuardian story about why humanity has failed to change course when it comes to climate change
 
As permafrost melts, more methane-fueled explosions are pockmarking Siberia's landscape.
LINK: As permafrost melts, more methane-fueled explosions are pockmarking Siberia's landscape

TEXT: "Siberia, already known for unwelcoming terrain, now has even more explosive craters than scientists thought.Called pingos, these massive holes form when natural gas builds up beneath the ground—and then ignites. Boom.

"The region's recent warmer-than-usual summers have been melting permafrost, resulting in thawing and rotting organic materials that release the highly flammable methane. Having first detected three pingos last summer, scientists (and the area's reindeer herders) are now finding dozens of them.

"As a potent greenhouse gas, the methane burped up from below isn't doing our climate any favors, but so far pingos aren't releasing enough of the gas to worry scientists too much. Even so, do you think the earth may be trying to tell us something?"
 
How Climate Change Triggers War
TEXT: "Published on March 10, 2015: Professor Richard Seager, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory-Columbia University joins Thom Hartmann. Four years of bloody civil war has claimed more than 200,000 lives in Syria. The experts say Syria's turmoil is all about sectarian politics - but could climate change be the real culprit?"
 
Op-Ed
California has about one year of water left. Will you ration now?
LINK: California has about one year of water left. Will you ration now? - LA Times


TEXT: "Given the historic low temperatures and snowfalls that pummeled the eastern U.S. this winter, it might be easy to overlook how devastating California's winter was as well.

As our “wet” season draws to a close, it is clear that the paltry rain and snowfall have done almost nothing to alleviate epic drought conditions. January was the driest in California since record-keeping began in 1895. Groundwater and snowpack levels are at all-time lows. We're not just up a creek without a paddle in California, we're losing the creek too.


Data from NASA satellites show that the total amount of water stored in the Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins — that is, all of the snow, river and reservoir water, water in soils and groundwater combined — was 34 million acre-feet below normal in 2014. That loss is nearly 1.5 times the capacity of Lake Mead, America's largest reservoir.

Statewide, we've been dropping more than 12 million acre-feet of total water yearly since 2011. Roughly two-thirds of these losses are attributable to groundwater pumping for agricultural irrigation in the Central Valley. Farmers have little choice but to pump more groundwater during droughts, especially when their surface water allocations have been slashed 80% to 100%. But these pumping rates are excessive and unsustainable. Wells are running dry. In some areas of the Central Valley, the land is sinking by one foot or more per year.

As difficult as it may be to face, the simple fact is that California is running out of water — and the problem started before our current drought. NASA data reveal that total water storage in California has been in steady decline since at least 2002, when satellite-based monitoring began, although groundwater depletion has been going on since the early 20th century.

How was Exide allowed to pollute for so long and endanger so many people?
Right now the state has only about one year of water supply left in its reservoirs, and our strategic backup supply, groundwater, is rapidly disappearing. California has no contingency plan for a persistent drought like this one (let alone a 20-plus-year mega-drought), except, apparently, staying in emergency mode and praying for rain.

In short, we have no paddle to navigate this crisis.

Several steps need be taken right now. First, immediate mandatory water rationing should be authorized across all of the state's water sectors, from domestic and municipal through agricultural and industrial. The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California is already considering water rationing by the summer unless conditions improve. There is no need for the rest of the state to hesitate. The public is ready. A recent Field Poll showed that 94% of Californians surveyed believe that the drought is serious, and that one-third support mandatory rationing.

Second, the implementation of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act of 2014 should be accelerated. The law requires the formation of numerous, regional groundwater sustainability agencies by 2017. Then each agency must adopt a plan by 2022 and “achieve sustainability” 20 years after that. At that pace, it will be nearly 30 years before we even know what is working. By then, there may be no groundwater left to sustain.

Third, the state needs a task force of thought leaders that starts, right now, brainstorming to lay the groundwork for long-term water management strategies. Although several state task forces have been formed in response to the drought, none is focused on solving the long-term needs of a drought-prone, perennially water-stressed California.

Our state's water management is complex, but the technology and expertise exist to handle this harrowing future. It will require major changes in policy and infrastructure that could take decades to identify and act upon. Today, not tomorrow, is the time to begin.

Finally, the public must take ownership of this issue. This crisis belongs to all of us — not just to a handful of decision-makers. Water is our most important, commonly owned resource, but the public remains detached from discussions and decisions.

This process works just fine when water is in abundance. In times of crisis, however, we must demand that planning for California's water security be an honest, transparent and forward-looking process. Most important, we must make sure that there is in fact a plan.

Call me old-fashioned, but I'd like to live in a state that has a paddle so that it might also still have a creek.

Jay Famiglietti is the senior water scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Caltech and a professor of Earth system science at UC Irvine.


The below is a re-print of the above op-ed in another source. I link to it here because it has some good graphics.

NASA Scientist Warns "California Has One Year Of Water Left"

by Tyler Durden on 03/13/2015
LINK: NASA Scientist Warns "California Has One Year Of Water Left" | Zero Hedge


If the above doesn't drive home that Climate Change is deadly real - and yes, Virginia, is human induced this time round (regardless what is 'true', we are in a pickle, and need to act now - no more debate) then what will I do not know. One has to be facing it - as is Florida with it's 'nuisance flooding'.

In the Northwest, engineers and scientists are preparing for an expected surge in climate variability and preparing for related refugees that will likely come from southern California, Arizona and New Mexico, where it is already too hot for some during the hottest times of the year. Massive desalination plants are needed in addition, of course, to changing back the forest areas of the northern hemisphere to re-supply humidity and the elements necessary for the atmosphere to regenerate. People are thinking - turn pools into gardens, close the golf courses, extend use of water catchment, etc.
 
Nation's largest ocean desalination plant goes up near San Diego; Future of the California coast? By Paul Rogers
LINK: Nation's largest ocean desalination plant goes up near San Diego; Future of the California coast? - San Jose Mercury News

TEXT: "CARLSBAD -- On sunny afternoons, this stretch of beach 35 miles north of San Diego offers a classic So uthern California backdrop: joggers, palm trees and surfers, flanked by waves rolling in and pelicans soaring overhead.

But just across the road, another scene, unlike any other in the state's history, is playing out: More than 300 construction workers are digging trenches and assembling a vast network of pipes, tanks and high-tech equipment as three massive yellow cranes labor nearby.

The crews are building what boosters say represents California's best hope for a drought-proof water supply: the largest ocean desalination plant in the Western Hemisphere. The $1 billion project will provide 50 million gallons of drinking water a day for San Diego County when it opens in 2016.





Since the 1970s, California has dipped its toe into ocean desalination --talking, planning, debating. But for a variety of reasons -- mainly cost and environmental concerns-- the state has never taken the plunge.

Until now.

Fifteen desalination projects are proposed along the coast from Los Angeles to San Francisco Bay. Desalination technology is becoming more efficient. And the state is mired in its third year of drought. Critics and backers alike are wondering whether this project in a town better known as the home of Legoland and skateboard icon Tony Hawk is ushering in a new era.

Will California -- like Israel, Saudi Arabia and other arid coastal regions of the world -- finally turn to the ocean to quench its thirst? Or will the project finally prove that drinking Pacific seawater is too pricey, too environmentally harmful and too impractical for the Golden State? "Everybody is watching Carlsbad to see what's going to happen," said Peter MacLaggan, vice president of Poseidon Water, the Boston firm building the plant. "I think it will be a growing trend along the coast," he said. "The ocean is the one source of water that's truly drought-proof. And it will always be there."

To supporters, the Carlsbad Desalination Plant is a historic engineering marvel. And it is a survivor, having endured six years of government permitting, from the Carlsbad City Council to the California Coastal Commission. Supporters won 14 lawsuits and appeals by environmentalists before finally breaking ground in December 2012. "They went through seven or eight years of hell to get here," said Tim Quinn, executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies. "But they stuck it out. They got it done. If it succeeds, it will encourage others to try. And if it fails, it will have a chilling effect."

To critics, the plant is a costly mistake that will use huge amounts of energy and harm fish and other marine life when it sucks in seawater using the intakes from the aging Encina Power Plant next door. "This is going to be the pig that will try for years to find the right shade of lipstick," said Marco Gonzalez, an Encinitas attorney who sued on behalf of the Surfrider Foundation and other environmental groups to try to stop construction. "This project will show that the water is just too expensive."

For the plant to be a success and copied in other parts of the state, Poseidon will have to deliver high-quality drinking water at the price promised -- and not cause unexpected impacts to the environment such as fish die-offs.



"It's a test case," said Ron Davis, executive director of Cal Desal, an industry advocacy group. "We like to tease them: Only the entire future of desal is riding on this project. No pressure."

HIGH COST
Almost every discussion about desalination begins and ends with cost. Desalinated water typically costs about $2,000 an acre foot -- roughly the amount of water a family of five uses in a year. The cost is about double that of water obtained from building a new reservoir or recycling wastewater, according to a 2013 study from the state Department of Water Resources.

And its price tag is at least four times the cost of obtaining "new water" from conservation methods -- such as paying farmers to install drip irrigation, or providing rebates for homeowners to rip out lawns or buy water-efficient toilets. "We look out and see a vast ocean. It seems obvious," said Heather Cooley, water director for the Pacific Institute, a nonprofit research organization in Oakland. "But it's cost prohibitive for most places in California."

In Carlsbad, two gallons of seawater will be needed to produce each gallon of drinking water. And to remove the salt, the plant will use an enormous amount of energy -- about 38 megawatts, enough to power 28,500 homes -- to force 100 million gallons of seawater a day through a series of filters. The process, known as reverse osmosis, removes salt and other impurities by blasting the water at six times the pressure of a fire hose through membranes with microscopic holes.

San Diego County is better suited than any large California community for desalination. It receives only 10 inches of rain a year, one-third less than Los Angeles, Fresno or San Jose. It has very little groundwater. And it has a large customer base to spread out the cost of the Carlsbad plant, which will provide about 7 percent of the total water needs of the county.

The high price is worth it to help San Diego and other regions rely less on water from the Colorado River and the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, both of which are overdrawn and increasingly unreliable, said Bob Yamada, water resources manager for the San Diego County Water Authority. "You can't conserve or recycle what you don't have," Yamada said. "Desal offers us local control."

The authority will pay from $2,014 to $2,257 an acre foot for the water, depending on how much it buys. The agency, which provides water to 3.1 million people in San Diego County, signed a 30-year contract agreeing to buy at least 48,000 acre feet a year. With that guarantee, Poseidon and its investors were able to sell bonds to finance the project. The company will be guaranteed a rate of return between 9 and 13 percent, depending on operating costs. Critics say the agency is getting a raw deal. "It's not a public-private partnership," Gonzalez said. "It's corporate welfare." Nobody disputes that the cost of water will go up. According to Yamada, the average customer's bill, now $71 a month, will rise $5 to $7 to pay for desalination.

SANTA BARBARA REDUX?
Sometimes the high costs can turn off the spigot. After enduring severe water shortages during a drought in the late 1980s, Santa Barbara voters agreed to spend $34 million to build a desalination plant. It opened in 1991 and provided water for four months. When the drought ended, the city shut it down. Water from reservoirs and other sources was significantly cheaper.

Similarly, Australia spent more than $10 billion building six huge seawater desalination plants during a severe drought from 1997 to 2009. Today, Cooley noted, four are shut down because when rains finally came, the cost of the water became noncompetitive. "We run the risk of building facilities that we don't use," Cooley said. "And that's a waste of money."

Earlier this month, the Santa Barbara City Council voted to spend $935,000 to hire an engineering firm, law firm and lobbyist to try to restart the city's shuttered plant by 2016. "None of us wants to do it, but I was there 25 years ago, and it's really ugly when you run out of water," said Santa Barbara City Councilman Harwood "Bendy" White. "This is one option for stretching out our supplies."

MONTEREY COUNTY
Similarly, the California American Water Company in Monterey County is studying three locations to build a desal plant to make up for water lost when state regulators ruled the company didn't have valid permits for the Carmel River. In Los Angeles, leaders of the West Basin Municipal Water District, which serves about 100,000 people, built a pilot plant in Redondo Beach and are studying plans for a $300 million desalination plant by 2020.

Desal technology continues to improve. It now takes only a quarter of the electricity to generate drinking water as it did in the 1980s because of more efficient pumps, membranes and energy-recovery devices, said Tom Pankratz, editor of the Water Desalination Report, a newsletter based in Houston.

But some places are balking.

Santa Cruz city officials in August shelved plans for a desal plant after environmental activists raised fears that the new water might trigger more growth. Marin County studied a desal project, then dropped it when water use declined. Long-running plans to build a desal plant in San Francisco Bay near Concord were shelved this year when the region's largest water districts decided they could obtain water more cheaply through recycling and other means.

Another key issue looming large is how to get the seawater without hurting the marine environment. The Coastal Commission approved the Carlsbad plant and its open-ocean intake system. But new scientific studies and changing laws mean that most future plants probably will be required to bury intake pipes and pump water at a lower rate to reduce impacts on fish and the millions of larvae, eggs and other sea life that can be killed. "These organisms become things -- like fish -- and we always have to be careful of the perspective that 'Oh, this is just one little piece,'" said Charles Lester, executive director of the Coastal Commission. "It all adds up."

Plans by Poseidon to build a desalination plant in Huntington Beach slowed last year when the Coastal Commission said it wanted the company to investigate whether its pipes could be buried, a prospect that will increase costs. For the Carlsbad plant Poseidon was required to build 66 acres of wetlands in San Diego Bay to offset the plant's environmental harm. It also must blend its brine at a 5:1 ratio with other seawater before flushing it back into the ocean so it won't harm marine life. Other projects will have to do all those things to get state permits.

But some experts say the plants are coming anyway. "In the next 10 years you are probably going to have three big plants built in Southern California and another plant or two in Northern California," Pankratz said. "The trend is toward more desal. They are the most reasonable insurance policy against a long, protracted drought."​
 
THE BIG GREEN DISCOUNT: States that produce renewable energy have cheap electricity
LINK: Electricity is cheap in states with renewable energy

TEXT: "Texas is known for cheap and plentiful energy resources, but they’re usually of the dirty, fossil fuel–based variety. That reputation is changing. Texans can now buy renewable energy packages that are as cheap as or cheaper than the coal- or natural gas–based alternatives.

"Texas is not an anomaly. A study released Friday by the venture capitalist firm DBL Investors shows that states boasting robust green energy programs have the nation’s cheapest electricity. The trend lines suggest it’s only going to get better for their consumers. In 2001, electricity cost more in the 10 top renewable energy states than it did in the 10 states with the lowest proportion of green energy production. By 2013, the situation had turned upside down: States with the most green energy now offer cheap electricity, while the dirty power states are the most expensive.

"You could probably figure out whether you’re in a top 10 or bottom 10 renewable energy state by tracking your utilities payments over the past few years. Just in case you don’t archive your electricity bills, the 10 states with cheap green energy are Maine, Iowa, South Dakota, California, Idaho, Kansas, Minnesota, North Dakota, and Oklahoma, plus Washington, D.C. (Hawaii also has a high proportion of renewable energy, but it was excluded because its remoteness dictates energy prices more than any other factor.) The 10 laggard states in the DBL study were Florida, Connecticut, Delaware, South Carolina, West Virginia, Rhode Island, Ohio, Missouri, Tennessee, and Kentucky.

"What happened? Technology. The sun and the wind are free. (It sounds like something from a Joni Mitchell song, but it’s true.) The price of renewables is therefore based almost entirely on the cost and efficiency of the hardware that captures the energy. That’s a good thing, because, over the past few decades, engineers have demonstrated an incredible knack for making technology smarter, faster, and cheaper. (See, for instance, Moore’s Law.) The cost of fossil fuel–based electricity, in contrast, depends overwhelmingly on commodity prices. There’s only so much that engineers, economists, and logistics experts can do to manage the swings in coal and natural gas prices.

"This is a big advantage for renewables. The cost of wind power has dropped 58 percentin the past five years. Take a look below at what has happened to the cost of solar cells and modules over the past decade. It’s not a precipitous drop, but there is an obvious downward trend.

screen_shot_2015-03-13_at_5.21.03_pm.png


"Compare that to the wild swings in the cost of natural gas below. There’s no discernible pattern. The price can increase by a factor of six over the course of five years, then decrease by the same amount in four years.

graph2_0.gif

"Imagine you’re an accountant at a utility company and have to do some projects for the next few years. Which of these graphs do you want to deal with?

"This isn’t just a feel-good study about the success of renewables; it’s a direct challenge to the dishonest lobbying of fossil fuel interests.
The American Legislative Exchange Council—the secretive coalition of corporative executives who want to write their own state laws—is currently trying to dismantle renewable portfolio standards, the rules that require utilities to generate a proportion of their energy from green sources. This Koch Industries–funded “think tank” claims that “green energy mandates replace the free market with bureaucratic government oversight, driving up costs.”

"I wanted to start this paragraph with “The Koch machine has never been so wrong,” but that’s not accurate. Koch mouthpieces are wrong about so many other things, often spectacularly so. But this is a fairly clear lie. The DBL study is correlational—it doesn’t prove that green energy caused prices to drop; it merely shows that green energy states tend to have lower prices. Nevertheless, the accumulating data makes it very difficult to substantiate the claim that renewable portfolio standards increase electricity costs. Including a high proportion of renewable energy in a utility’s mix of sources does not increase prices. The Koch machine won’t stop saying so, of course. They tend not to worry about things like “studies” and “research.” But you should."
 
Op-Ed
Renewable energy is a California success story - March 11, 2015
LINK: Renewable energy is a California success story - LA Times

TEXT: "In 2011, Solyndra, a California-based solar panel manufacturer, defaulted on a $535-million federal loan and went bankrupt. Critics argued that this proved renewable energy was hopelessly impractical and expensive and that federal and state policies to support it were a waste of taxpayer money. Americans for Prosperity, a group funded by the Koch brothers, spent $6 million on an ad campaign highlighting the company as a symbol of failure. Even the venerable “60 Minutes” got into the fray, reporting there was a “cleantech crash.” California, in particular, was singled out for ridicule. Pundits warned that strong support for renewable energy would bring down our economy.

"But four years later, the real story is that the focus on the demise of a single company obscured the emergence of a thriving industry. Renewable energy has grown so rapidly that, in 2014, it accounted for most new electric generation capacity added nationwide. California leads the pack with the share of electricity from renewable sources, more than doubling from 12% in 2008 to 25% today. In that period, private companies invested more than $20 billion in new renewable power plants here. California is home to the largest geothermal, wind, solar thermal and solar photovoltaic power plants in the world.

"All the leading utilities in the state have signed contracts ensuring the state will get more than 33% of its electricity from renewables by 2020. Renewable energy prices have fallen to record lows. Building on that momentum, Gov. Jerry Brown has set a new state goal of 50% renewable energy by 2030. Reaching such a milestone would make fossil fuels the alternative energy. Momentum also exists at the local level. Mayor R. Rex Parris of Lancaster, Calif., made his city the first in the nation to mandate solar power on all new construction.

"The clean energy projects and companies enabled by federal and state policy support are creating new technologies and adding a competitive advantage to the U.S. economy along with new jobs. The U.S. solar industry's job growth increased 86% in the last five years and employs 174,000 Americans. More than 75,000 Americans work in the wind power industry. In California, more work in the solar energy industry than in all the state's investor-owned utilities combined.

LINK: California's bold attack on climate change

"President Reagan, like many people in both parties at the time, thought renewable energy was a pipe dream and removed the solar panels President Carter had installed on the White House roof. But Reagan's secretary of State, George Shultz, has noted, “The United States is on the cusp of a true revolution in the field of energy, and if we can capitalize on these opportunities we'll have a much better energy future from the standpoint of our national defense, from the standpoint of our economy, and from the standpoint of our environment.”

"And he's right. Shultz now drives an electric car and has put solar panels on his house.

"If we have learned one thing in the years since Solyndra, it is that, though individual companies can and do fail, it is a bad idea to bet against clean energy innovation. Even as a work in progress, California is demonstrating that the transition to more secure, sustainable forms of energy can also offer a more prosperous future.

"California-based SolarCity, the largest solar installer in the world, has been acquiring new space. One of the buildings the firm is moving into is the old Solyndra factory.

David Hochschild is a commissioner at the California Energy Commission, the state's primary energy policy and planning agency. David Olsen is a member of the board of governors of the California Independent System Operator, which manages the state's electric grid.
 
The Arctic's climate change is messing with our weather
Rapid Arctic warming is changing the Jestream and our weather along with it
LINK: The Arctic's climate change is messing with our weather | John Abraham | Environment | The Guardian

TEXT: "The jet stream that circles Earth’s north pole travels west to east. But when the jet stream interacts with a Rossby wave, as shown here [see graphic in link] the winds can wander far north and south. Photograph: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
b7acb6bc-724d-4e2e-9078-17bb01ce052b-620x372.jpeg

The jet stream that circles Earth’s north pole travels west to east. But when the jet stream interacts with a Rossby wave, as shown here, the winds can wander far north and south. Photograph: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

"There has been a lot of attention on the influence of rapid warming of the Arctic on weather in the Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes. Much of the work has focused on changes to the Jetstream amplitudes and association of these changes to ice loss in the Arctic.

"We know that the Arctic is heating faster than the planet as a whole. Consequently, there is more energy in the Arctic which can be transmitted to the atmosphere. Much of the excess heat is transferred to the atmosphere in the late fall or early winter. This extra energy is connected to what’s called Arctic geopotential height, which has increased during the same times of the year. As a consequence, the Jetstream might weaken in the cold seasons.

"But what about summer? Have these changes been detected then too? Well just recently, a paper was published in that answered this question. The authors, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and from the University of Potsdam reported on three measures of atmospheric dynamics (1) zonal winds, (2) eddy kinetic energy, and (3) amplitude of the fast-moving Rossby waves. Rossby waves are very large waves in the upper atmospheric winds. They are important because of their large influence on weather.

"The authors found that the summer zonal winds have weakened. The reason for the weakening is that since the Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the planet, the temperature difference between the Arctic and the lower latitudes is getting smaller. It is this temperature difference which maintains the wind speeds. The authors also found that eddy kinetic energy is decreasing.

"So what does all this mean? Well two things. First, it means that there are either fewer or less intense summer storms or a combination of both. But secondly, it means that weather patterns can get “stuck”. Storms are excellent at breaking up persistent weather patterns, and bringing cool and moist air from ocean regions to land zones. With fewer storms, “warm weather conditions endure, resulting in buildup of heat and drought.”

"The authors looked to the future to inquire about how things would continue to change. They find that continued global warming will increase the risk of heat waves. We all know that the warming temperature will make heat waves more likely. But added to this, “stickiness” of weather patterns will play a big role as well.

"Whether it is the heat wave in Europe of 2003, the Russian heat wave of 2010, the heat waves in the USA in 2011 or 2012, or last year’s (and still continuing heat in California), these events have economic and human consequences. It is crucial to understand how our current climate works if we have any hope in predicting what will happen in the future. This study makes a great contribution to putting the puzzle of the Earth’s climate together.

"I asked colleague Dr. Stefan Rahmstorf about this work and he said: "I think the idea that the mid-latitude winds, especially the jet stream, may be changing in response to Arctic warming has proven to be a highly fruitful one. Now that scientists have started to analyze the available wind data in a systematic way, very interesting patterns emerge that also make physical sense. It is increasingly clear that global warming does not just mean global warming in a narrow sense. Our planet is not simply getting warmer - rather this warming comes with real changes to the workings of the atmosphere and the oceans."
 
The melting of Antarctica was already really bad. It just got worse. By Chris Mooney March 16, 2015
LINK: The melting of Antarctica was already really bad. It just got worse. - The Washington Post

NOTE: Sorry for the very large graphic. I've only just realized I can copy-and-paste the graphics, and when they are interesting graphics, I am making an effort to supply them in the post. In this case the graphic refuses to minimize - hence the very large result. Sorry. :(

TEXT: "A hundred years from now, humans may remember 2014 as the year that we first learned that we may have irreversibly destabilized the great ice sheet of West Antarctica, and thus set in motion more than 10 feet of sea level rise.

"Meanwhile, 2015 could be the year of the double whammy — when we learned the same about one gigantic glacier of East Antarctica, which could set in motion roughly the same amount all over again. Northern Hemisphere residents and Americans in particular should take note — when the bottom of the world loses vast amounts of ice, those of us living closer to its top get more sea level rise than the rest of the planet, thanks to the law of gravity.

"The findings about East Antarctica emerge from a new paper just out in Nature Geoscience by an international team of scientists representing the United States, Britain, France and Australia. They flew a number of research flights over the Totten Glacier of East Antarctica — the fastest-thinning sector of the world’s largest ice sheet — and took a variety of measurements to try to figure out the reasons behind its retreat. And the news wasn’t good: It appears that Totten, too, is losing ice because warm ocean water is getting underneath it. “The idea of warm ocean water eroding the ice in West Antarctica, what we’re finding is that may well be applicable in East Antarctica as well,” says Martin Siegert, a co-author of the study and who is based at the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London.

[Research casts alarming light on the decline of West Antarctic glaciers]

"The floating ice shelf of the Totten Glacier covers an area of 90 miles by 22 miles. It it is losing an amount of ice “equivalent to 100 times the volume of Sydney Harbour every year,” notes the Australian Antarctic Division. That’s alarming, because the glacier holds back a much more vast catchment of ice that, were its vulnerable parts to flow into the ocean, could produce a sea level rise of more than 11 feet — which is comparable to the impact from a loss of the West Antarctica ice sheet. And that’s “a conservative lower limit,” says lead study author Jamin Greenbaum, a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin.



"In its alignment with the land and the sea, the Totten Glacier is similar to the West Antarctic glaciers, which also feature ice shelves that slope out from the vast sheet of ice on land and extend into the water. These ice shelves are a key source of instability, because if ocean waters beneath them warm, they can lose ice rapidly, allowing the ice sheet behind them to flow more quickly into the sea.

"The researchers used three separate types of measurements taken during their flights — gravitational measurements, radar and laser altimetry — to get a glimpse of what might be happening beneath the massive glacier, whose ice shelves are more than 1,600 feet thick in places. Using radar, they could measure the ice’s thickness. Meanwhile, by measuring the pull of the Earth’s gravity on the airplane in different places, the scientists were able to determine just how far below that ice the seafloor was.

"The result was the discovery of two undersea troughs or valleys beneath the ice shelf — regions where the seafloor slopes downward, allowing a greater depth of water beneath the floating ice. These cavities or subsea valleys, the researchers suggest, may explain the glacier’s retreat — they could allow warmer deep waters to get underneath the ice shelf, accelerating its melting.

" "In this particular area of Antarctica, Greenbaum says, a warmer layer of ocean water offshore is actually deeper than the colder layers above it, because of the saltwater content of the warm water (which increases its density). And the canyons may allow that warm water access to the glacier base. “What we found here is that there are seafloor valleys deeper than the depth of the maximum temperature measured near the glacier,” Greenbaum says. One of these canyons is three miles wide, in a region that was previously believed to simply hold ice lying atop solid earth. On the contrary, the new study suggests the ice is instead afloat.

"The availability of warm water, and the observed melting", notes the study, “support the idea that the behaviour of Totten Glacier is an East Antarctic analogue to ocean-driven retreat underway in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS). The global sea level potential of 3.5 m flowing through Totten Glacier alone is of similar magnitude to the entire probable contribution of the WAIS.”
"For Richard Alley, a glaciologist at Penn State University, the new research hints at a possible solution to a question that scientists have long had about the planet’s past — and in particular the Pliocene epoch, beginning 5.3 million years ago, when sea levels were dramatically higher, by as much as 40 meters. “The sea-level indicators from the Pliocene have suggested that an important amount of ice came out of East Antarctica into the ocean,” says Alley. “Sedimentary records offshore pointed in the same way, and recent modeling…shows the strong potential for this to have happened. This new paper adds to the evidence — the pieces are fitting together.”

"One limitation of the study is that the scientists were not able to directly measure the temperature of ocean water that is reaching the glacier itself. While this could be done with robotic underwater vehicles or other methods, that wasn’t part of the study at this time. Thus, the conclusions are more focused on inferring the vulnerability of the glacier based on a number of different pieces of evidence — topped off by the fact that the glacier is, indeed, retreating.

" “What we need now is a confirmation of the findings of the paper from oceanographic data, because it is one thing to find potential pathways for warm water to intrude the cavity, it is another to show that this is actually happening,” observes Eric Rignot, an Antarctica expert at the University of California, Irvine. “This paper comes short of the latter, but other research efforts are underway to get critical oceanographic information near Totten.”

[These subsea drones are figuring out just how badly we are messing up the planet]

NASA | Maximum Antarctic Sea Ice 2014 [HD]
TEXT: An animation of the Antarctic sea ice between March 21 and Sept. 19, 2014, when the sea ice reached its maximum extent. The red extent line shows the average of the annual maximum extents from 1979 through 2014. (NASA)

"For residents of the United States — and indeed, the entire Northern Hemisphere — the impact of major ice loss from Antarctica could be dire. If Antarctica loses volumes of ice that would translate into major contributions to sea level rise,that risewould not be distributed evenly around the globe. The reason is the force of gravity. Antarctica is so massive that it pulls the ocean toward it, but if it loses ice, that gravitational pull will relax, and the ocean will slosh back toward the Northern Hemisphere — which will experience additional sea level rise. For the United States, the amount of sea level rise could be 25 percent or more than the global average.

[The U.S. has caused more global warming than any other country. Here's how the Earth will get its revenge.]

"Much as with the ocean-abutting glaciers of West Antarctica, just because a retreat has been observed — and because the entirety of the region implies a sea level rise of 11 or more feet were all ice to end up in the ocean — does not mean that we’ll see anything near that much sea level rise in our lifetimes. These processes generally are expected to play out over hundreds of years or more. They would reshape the face of the Earth – but we may never see it.

"The problem, then, is more the world we’re leaving to our children and grandchildren — because once such a gigantic geophysical process begins, it’s hard to see how it comes to a halt. “With warming oceans, it’s difficult to see how a process that starts now would be reversed, or reversible, in a warming world,” Siegert says."
 
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Arctic Sea Ice, Summer 2014
TEXT: "Published on Sep 22, 2014: An animation of daily Arctic sea ice extent in summer 2014, from March 21, 2014 to Sept. 17, 2014 – when the ice appeared to reach it’s minimum extent for the year. It’s the sixth lowest minimum sea ice extent in the satellite era. The data was provided by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency from their GCOM-W1 satellite’s AMSR2 instrument."
 
Just for fun - a great animation. :)

Earth 100 Million Years From Now
TEXT: "Uploaded on Feb 12, 2010: Earth's landmasses were not always what they are today. Continents formed as Earth's crustal plates shifted and collided over long periods of time. This video shows how today's continents are thought to have evolved over the last 600 million years, and where they'll end up in the next 100 million years. Paleogeographic Views of Earth's History provided by Ron Blakey, Professor of Geology, Northern Arizona University."
 
SOTT Summary - January 2015: Extreme Weather, Earth Changes, and Fireballs
TEXT: "Published on Feb 8, 2015: The following video compiles footage of 'signs of the times' from around the world during January 2015 - 'earth changes', extreme weather, meteor fireballs, and planetary upheaval.

"Phenomenal amounts of snow were dumped in the Northeastern and Southern US, Western and Southeastern Europe, the Middle East, Western China, and Far Eastern Russia. Saudi Arabia and the Southwestern US desert were hit with snow for the third year running. The US media has apparently dropped the term 'Polar Vortex' because Arctic conditions extending all the way to the Gulf of Mexico is now 'normal'. The one place where you might expect a lot of snow this time of year - Moscow - instead enjoyed its warmest January in 100 years.

"The Great Lakes in North America aren't as frozen over as they were this time last year, but those 'ice boulders' returned to Michigan in January, and the Niagara Falls have again partially frozen. Up to half a million people were affected by the worst flooding Southeastern Africa has seen for decades. The Balkans were flooded for the 5th time in 20 months, and barely two months on from receiving 70cm of rain in one day, Sicily was hit with a similar quantity of hail. Among the spectacular meteor fireball sightings in January were a comet fragment breaking apart over the Russian Far East, and a fireball that turned night into day in Bucharest, Romania.

" 'Mystery booms' continue to freak people (and animals) out across the US. We suspect that some of them are shockwaves from overhead meteor explosions, but others occur in clusters and are picked up by seismometers (despite there being no known fault-lines), so we are probably looking at general and unusual seismic activity resulting from the slow-down in the planet's rotation. This would also be responsible for all these volcanic eruptions, of which there were more spectacular ones in January. 'Earth opening up' also saw sinkholes swallow moving cars in Florida and Maryland.

"As you watch this video summary of events in January, keep in mind that we had to leave out so many other unusual events because they're now part of 'the new normal'! "
 
SOTT Summary February 2015 - Extreme Weather, Earth Changes, and Fireballs
TEXT: "Published on Mar 8, 2015: The following video compiles footage of 'signs of the times' from around the world during February 2015 - 'earth changes', extreme weather, meteor fireballs, and planetary upheaval.

"The pattern of global deluges continued last month as flooding again hit the Balkans, Greece, Bolivia, Argentina, Saudi Arabia, the U.S. Northwest, Australia, and East Africa. February saw 'orange' snow, 'blue' snow and 'dirty rain' as particulates from ever more erupting volcanoes and incoming meteors continue to build up in the atmosphere. It's not just conditions above ground that are changing: alarming numbers of whales, sea lions and other sea creatures continue to wash up dead or dying on beaches around the world.

"February saw meteor fireballs ranging from flashes that momentarily turned night into day over New Zealand, Florida and Korea... to a long-duration bolide of comet/asteroid size that broke up over the western half of North America. There were several major train derailments in February, particularly in the U.S., where oil companies are bypassing pipeline networks to transport fracked oil. We suspect that many railway lines are deforming due to the increased seismic activity.

"More loud booms were heard and felt across the U.S. in February. Although attributed to 'frost quakes', where water seeps into the ground then freezes and cracks the bedrock, these localized booms also happened in ice-free regions, suggesting that some other mechanism is causing them. Besides strong earthquakes off Japan and along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, an unusually strong quake in central Spain sent people running into the streets. Japan saw more snow records broken, wild weather continued to pummel the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Middle East was again snowed under.

"THE major weather event in February 2015 was the record snow and cold in the U.S. Northeast. The South and Midwest were also hit hard, but the Northeast appears to have had both its snowiest and coldest month ever, at least since since record-keeping began in the mid-19th century. Meteorologists attributed this to the meandering Polar Jet stream delivering a 'Siberian Express' of non-stop winter storms from the northern Pacific down and across the North American continent, but another factor could be super-cool air coming down from the troposphere.

"The ice age cometh?"
 
A CARBON SINK, SINKING: A new study suggests excess carbon dioxide is shrinking the Amazon.
LINK: Is excess carbon dioxide ruining the Amazon?

TEXT: "What comes to mind when you think about deforestation in the Amazon? Probably clear-cutting, burning, ranching, maybe the increasing acreage for soybean cultivation. Those things are bad enough, but a new study published in Nature suggests we may have found yet another way to destroy the rainforest: choking the trees on carbon dioxide, the very thing they feed on. It’s the botanical equivalent of making foie gras.

"For nearly 30 years, a team of scientists at the University of Leeds in the U.K. has counted and measured almost every tree on 321 plots in the Amazon—a total of around 189,000 trees. They were trying to determine how much carbon the rainforest was absorbing from the atmosphere and how much it released into the air from decaying vegetation. The plots showed no signs of human disturbance, so changes in vegetation could not be blamed on farmers or ranchers (at least not directly).

"Throughout the 1980s and for most of the ’90s, the trees’ growth rate increased—likely the result of increasing carbon dioxide levels in the air. Scientists have long known that the carbon fertilization effect of our excess emissions would help plants grow faster. It also, however, seems to make them die faster. “It’s a difficult phenomenon to prove, because trees have very long life spans,” says Roel Brienen, the study's lead author. “But if you pump more carbon dioxide into a mature forest, trees will produce seeds and flowers at a younger age, which suggests they will complete their life cycle faster.

"Tree-ring research also indicates that trees that grow faster tend to die younger. And, as Brienen points out, cross-species comparisons within both the plant and animal kingdoms suggest that living fast really does lead to dying young. Mice mature in onlytwo or three weeks and die before age three. Elephants, in contrast, take up to 13 years to mature but live well into their 40s, if not longer.

"Back to those trees. During the 1980s and ’90s, the accelerating growth and death rates were roughly in balance, so the rainforest continued to absorb and store carbon at a high rate. Beginning around the turn of the millennium, however, death pulled far ahead of growth on the monitored plots. Over the past decade, the amount of carbon absorbed annually by the Amazon has declined by 30 percent. Brienen and his team still aren’t sure what caused the imbalance. A couple of droughts probably contributed, but the slowdown in growth happened before the first major one in 2005, and plots that weren’t affected by severe drought saw the same drop-off. It’s also possible that decreased nutrients or changes in temperature are to blame.

"We don’t know what will happen next. The shrinking of the Amazon’s carbon-storing capacity has been fairly linear over the past decade. Will it level off, making the rainforest carbon-neutral over the long term? Or will the trend line cross the x-axis, as decaying trees and stalled growth transform the Amazon into a major source of atmospheric carbon?

"It’s a terrifying thought. While there’s debate about just how much carbon is stored in the Amazon, it’s a massive amount by any measure. Cars, cows, and coal are polluting the atmosphere efficiently enough. We don’t need trees getting in on the act."
 
Good points made. When does science dictate public policy?

Climate Science Is Not Settled: We are very far from the knowledge needed to make good climate policy, writes leading scientist Steven E. Koonin
By STEVEN E. KOONIN Sept. 19, 2014
LINK: Climate Science Is Not Settled - WSJ

TEXT: "The idea that "Climate science is settled" runs through today's popular and policy discussions. Unfortunately, that claim is misguided. It has not only distorted our public and policy debates on issues related to energy, greenhouse-gas emissions and the environment. But it also has inhibited the scientific and policy discussions that we need to have about our climate future.

"My training as a computational physicist—together with a 40-year career of scientific research, advising and management in academia, government and the private sector—has afforded me an extended, up-close perspective on climate science. Detailed technical discussions during the past year with leading climate scientists have given me an even better sense of what we know, and don't know, about climate. I have come to appreciate the daunting scientific challenge of answering the questions that policy makers and the public are asking.

"The crucial scientific question for policy isn't whether the climate is changing. That is a settled matter: The climate has always changed and always will. Geological and historical records show the occurrence of major climate shifts, sometimes over only a few decades. We know, for instance, that during the 20th century the Earth's global average surface temperature rose 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit.

"Nor is the crucial question whether humans are influencing the climate. That is no hoax: There is little doubt in the scientific community that continually growing amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, due largely to carbon-dioxide emissions from the conventional use of fossil fuels, are influencing the climate. There is also little doubt that the carbon dioxide will persist in the atmosphere for several centuries. The impact today of human activity appears to be comparable to the intrinsic, natural variability of the climate system itself.

"Rather, the crucial, unsettled scientific question for policy is, "How will the climate change over the next century under both natural and human influences?" Answers to that question at the global and regional levels, as well as to equally complex questions of how ecosystems and human activities will be affected, should inform our choices about energy and infrastructure.

"But—here's the catch—those questions are the hardest ones to answer. They challenge, in a fundamental way, what science can tell us about future climates.

"Even though human influences could have serious consequences for the climate, they are physically small in relation to the climate system as a whole. For example, human additions to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by the middle of the 21st century are expected to directly shift the atmosphere's natural greenhouse effect by only 1% to 2%. Since the climate system is highly variable on its own, that smallness sets a very high bar for confidently projecting the consequences of human influences.

"A second challenge to "knowing" future climate is today's poor understanding of the oceans. The oceans, which change over decades and centuries, hold most of the climate's heat and strongly influence the atmosphere. Unfortunately, precise, comprehensive observations of the oceans are available only for the past few decades; the reliable record is still far too short to adequately understand how the oceans will change and how that will affect climate.

"A third fundamental challenge arises from feedbacks that can dramatically amplify or mute the climate's response to human and natural influences. One important feedback, which is thought to approximately double the direct heating effect of carbon dioxide, involves water vapor, clouds and temperature.

"But feedbacks are uncertain. They depend on the details of processes such as evaporation and the flow of radiation through clouds. They cannot be determined confidently from the basic laws of physics and chemistry, so they must be verified by precise, detailed observations that are, in many cases, not yet available.

"Beyond these observational challenges are those posed by the complex computer models used to project future climate. These massive programs attempt to describe the dynamics and interactions of the various components of the Earth system—the atmosphere, the oceans, the land, the ice and the biosphere of living things. While some parts of the models rely on well-tested physical laws, other parts involve technically informed estimation. Computer modeling of complex systems is as much an art as a science.

"For instance, global climate models describe the Earth on a grid that is currently limited by computer capabilities to a resolution of no finer than 60 miles. (The distance from New York City to Washington, D.C., is thus covered by only four grid cells.) But processes such as cloud formation, turbulence and rain all happen on much smaller scales. These critical processes then appear in the model only through adjustable assumptions that specify, for example, how the average cloud cover depends on a grid box's average temperature and humidity. In a given model, dozens of such assumptions must be adjusted ("tuned," in the jargon of modelers) to reproduce both current observations and imperfectly known historical records.

"We often hear that there is a "scientific consensus" about climate change. But as far as the computer models go, there isn't a useful consensus at the level of detail relevant to assessing human influences. Since 1990, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, has periodically surveyed the state of climate science. Each successive report from that endeavor, with contributions from thousands of scientists around the world, has come to be seen as the definitive assessment of climate science at the time of its issue.

"For the latest IPCC report (September 2013), its Working Group I, which focuses on physical science, uses an ensemble of some 55 different models. Although most of these models are tuned to reproduce the gross features of the Earth's climate, the marked differences in their details and projections reflect all of the limitations that I have described. For example:

• The models differ in their descriptions of the past century's global average surface temperature by more than three times the entire warming recorded during that time. Such mismatches are also present in many other basic climate factors, including rainfall, which is fundamental to the atmosphere's energy balance. As a result, the models give widely varying descriptions of the climate's inner workings. Since they disagree so markedly, no more than one of them can be right.

• Although the Earth's average surface temperature rose sharply by 0.9 degree Fahrenheit during the last quarter of the 20th century, it has increased much more slowly for the past 16 years, even as the human contribution to atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen by some 25%. This surprising fact demonstrates directly that natural influences and variability are powerful enough to counteract the present warming influence exerted by human activity.

"Yet the models famously fail to capture this slowing in the temperature rise. Several dozen different explanations for this failure have been offered, with ocean variability most likely playing a major role. But the whole episode continues to highlight the limits of our modeling.

• The models roughly describe the shrinking extent of Arctic sea ice observed over the past two decades, but they fail to describe the comparable growth of Antarctic sea ice, which is now at a record high.

• The models predict that the lower atmosphere in the tropics will absorb much of the heat of the warming atmosphere. But that "hot spot" has not been confidently observed, casting doubt on our understanding of the crucial feedback of water vapor on temperature.

• Even though the human influence on climate was much smaller in the past, the models do not account for the fact that the rate of global sea-level rise 70 years ago was as large as what we observe today—about one foot per century.

• A crucial measure of our knowledge of feedbacks is climate sensitivity—that is, the warming induced by a hypothetical doubling of carbon-dioxide concentration. Today's best estimate of the sensitivity (between 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit and 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit) is no different, and no more certain, than it was 30 years ago. And this is despite an heroic research effort costing billions of dollars.

"These and many other open questions are in fact described in the IPCC research reports, although a detailed and knowledgeable reading is sometimes required to discern them. They are not "minor" issues to be "cleaned up" by further research. Rather, they are deficiencies that erode confidence in the computer projections. Work to resolve these shortcomings in climate models should be among the top priorities for climate research.

"Yet a public official reading only the IPCC's "Summary for Policy Makers" would gain little sense of the extent or implications of these deficiencies. These are fundamental challenges to our understanding of human impacts on the climate, and they should not be dismissed with the mantra that "climate science is settled."

"While the past two decades have seen progress in climate science, the field is not yet mature enough to usefully answer the difficult and important questions being asked of it. This decidedly unsettled state highlights what should be obvious: Understanding climate, at the level of detail relevant to human influences, is a very, very difficult problem.

"We can and should take steps to make climate projections more useful over time. An international commitment to a sustained global climate observation system would generate an ever-lengthening record of more precise observations. And increasingly powerful computers can allow a better understanding of the uncertainties in our models, finer model grids and more sophisticated descriptions of the processes that occur within them. The science is urgent, since we could be caught flat-footed if our understanding does not improve more rapidly than the climate itself changes.

"A transparent rigor would also be a welcome development, especially given the momentous political and policy decisions at stake. That could be supported by regular, independent, "red team" reviews to stress-test and challenge the projections by focusing on their deficiencies and uncertainties; that would certainly be the best practice of the scientific method. But because the natural climate changes over decades, it will take many years to get the data needed to confidently isolate and quantify the effects of human influences.

"Policy makers and the public may wish for the comfort of certainty in their climate science. But I fear that rigidly promulgating the idea that climate science is "settled" (or is a "hoax") demeans and chills the scientific enterprise, retarding its progress in these important matters. Uncertainty is a prime mover and motivator of science and must be faced head-on. It should not be confined to hushed sidebar conversations at academic conferences.

"Society's choices in the years ahead will necessarily be based on uncertain knowledge of future climates. That uncertainty need not be an excuse for inaction. There is well-justified prudence in accelerating the development of low-emissions technologies and in cost-effective energy-efficiency measures.

"But climate strategies beyond such "no regrets" efforts carry costs, risks and questions of effectiveness, so nonscientific factors inevitably enter the decision. These include our tolerance for risk and the priorities that we assign to economic development, poverty reduction, environmental quality, and intergenerational and geographical equity.

"Individuals and countries can legitimately disagree about these matters, so the discussion should not be about "believing" or "denying" the science. Despite the statements of numerous scientific societies, the scientific community cannot claim any special expertise in addressing issues related to humanity's deepest goals and values. The political and diplomatic spheres are best suited to debating and resolving such questions, and misrepresenting the current state of climate science does nothing to advance that effort.

"Any serious discussion of the changing climate must begin by acknowledging not only the scientific certainties but also the uncertainties, especially in projecting the future. Recognizing those limits, rather than ignoring them, will lead to a more sober and ultimately more productive discussion of climate change and climate policies. To do otherwise is a great disservice to climate science itself.

Dr. Koonin was undersecretary for science in the Energy Department during President Barack Obama's first term and is currently director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University. His previous positions include professor of theoretical physics and provost at Caltech, as well as chief scientist of BP, where his work focused on renewable and low-carbon energy technologies.
 
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The Brutal Winter That Wasn’t
TEXT: "Published on Mar 20, 2015: The East Coast is ready for spring - after what seems like one of the most brutal winters in history. As it turns out - this winter was record-breaking - but not in the way you think."
 
Kinetic Energy Hourglass Lamps Powered By Sand
LINK: Kinetic Energy Hourglass Lamps Powered By Sand

TEXT: "The developement of LED lighting has opened up lighting to an entire new developement phase. So little energy is used by the lights, that there are many many more options of ways to generate the light needed to brighten a space. That leads us to forefront designer Danielle Trofe who has quickly utilized the new technology in this fabulous innovation. I can't wait for the day it goes to production! Prototypes still being improved upon.
HourglassFloorLampWeb.jpg


Kinetic Energy Lamps

"The Hourglass Lamp Collection is powered by kinetic energy generated from the falling of sand. This off-the-grid lighting solution illuminates interior environments using LEDs. When the hourglass is flipped over the falling sand passes through an internal mechanism that generates energy to power the light. The need for human interaction creates a user connection and a greater awareness of the value and finite source of light energy. Project Status: 1st Prototype launched at WantedDesign 2013, R&D underway for additional prototypes and testing. The anticipated lighting time when turned over is about 20 minutes. Fingers crossed, we'll see them in production and coming available within a year or two. We'll keep you posted when they do!"
 
Arctic Sea Ice Hits Record Low Winter Maximum, Points To Evidence Of Long-Term Climate Change
Posted: 03/19/2015
LINK: Arctic Sea Ice Hits Record Low Winter Maximum, Points To Evidence Of Long-Term Climate Change

TEXT: "OSLO, March 19 (Reuters) - Arctic sea ice this year is the smallest in winter since satellite records began in 1979, in a new sign of long-term climate change, U.S. data showed on Thursday.

"The ice floating on the Arctic Ocean around the North Pole reached its maximum annual extent of just 14.54 million square kms (5.61 million sq miles) on Feb. 25 - slightly bigger than Canada - and is now expected to shrink with a spring thaw. "This year's maximum ice extent was the lowest in the satellite record, with below-average ice conditions everywhere except in the Labrador Sea and Davis Strait," the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) said in a statement.

"A late season surge in ice was still possible, it said. The ice was 1.1 million sq kms smaller than the 1981-2010 average, and below the previous lowest maximum in 2011. With the return of the sun to the Arctic after months of winter darkness, the ice shrinks to a minimum in September.

"The U.N. panel of climate scientists links the long-term shrinkage of the ice, by 3.8 percent a decade since 1979, to global warming and says Arctic summertime sea ice could vanish in the second half of the century. "The majority of models point in the same direction - less ice," said Sebastian Gerland, an expert at the Norwegian Polar Institute. And he said far less ice was surviving more than one winter - such ice is often thickest and most resilient.

"The U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization says 2014 was the warmest year since records began in the 19th century. Almost 200 nations have agreed to work out a deal in December in Paris to slow global warming. The Arctic thaw is disrupting indigenous hunting lifestyles in the Arctic while making the region more accessible. But low oil prices have discouraged exploration and tensions between the West and Russia have limited interest in Arctic shipping. "This new data on sea ice loss sends a clear message to the global community that the Arctic is unraveling, warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet," Rafe Pomerance, chair of Arctic 21, a group of environmental groups, said in a statement.

"At the other end of the planet, the NSIDC said earlier this month that sea ice around Antarctica was the fourth-smallest for summer. Climate scientists say the apparently contradictory trend may be tied to changing winds and currents. (Reporting by Alister Doyle; Editing by Tom Heneghan and Susan Fenton)"
 
Opposite Behaviors? Arctic Sea Ice Shrinks, Antarctic Grows
LINK: NASA - Opposite Behaviors? Arctic Sea Ice Shrinks, Antarctic Grows

TEXT: "September 2012 witnessed two opposite records concerning sea ice. Two weeks after the Arctic Ocean's ice cap experienced an all-time summertime low for the satellite era (left - see graphic), Antarctic sea ice reached a record winter maximum extent (right - see graphic). But sea ice in the Arctic has melted at a much faster rate than it has expanded in the Southern Ocean, as can be seen in this image by comparing the 2012 sea ice levels with the yellow outline, which in the Arctic image represents average sea ice minimum extent from 1979 through 2010 and in the Antarctic image shows the median sea ice extent in September from 1979 to 2000. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio and NASA Earth Observatory/ Jesse Allen
› View Arctic larger, › View Antarctic larger

"The steady and dramatic decline in the sea ice cover of the Arctic Ocean over the last three decades has become a focus of media and public attention. At the opposite end of the Earth, however, something more complex is happening.

A new NASA study shows that from 1978 to 2010 the total extent of sea ice surrounding Antarctica in the Southern Ocean grew by roughly 6,600 square miles every year, an area larger than the state of Connecticut. And previous research by the same authors indicates that this rate of increase has recently accelerated, up from an average rate of almost 4,300 square miles per year from 1978 to 2006. "There's been an overall increase in the sea ice cover in the Antarctic, which is the opposite of what is happening in the Arctic,” said lead author Claire Parkinson, a climate scientist with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. "However, this growth rate is not nearly as large as the decrease in the Arctic.”

"The Earth’s poles have very different geographies. The Arctic Ocean is surrounded by North America, Greenland and Eurasia. These large landmasses trap most of the sea ice, which builds up and retreats with each yearly freeze-and-melt cycle. But a large fraction of the older, thicker Arctic sea ice has disappeared over the last three decades. The shrinking summer ice cover has exposed dark ocean water that absorbs sunlight and warms up, leading to more ice loss.

"On the opposite side of the planet, Antarctica is a continent circled by open waters that let sea ice expand during the winter but also offer less shelter during the melt season. Most of the Southern Ocean’s frozen cover grows and retreats every year, leading to little perennial sea ice in Antarctica.

"Using passive-microwave data from NASA's Nimbus 7 satellite and several Department of Defense meteorological satellites, Parkinson and colleague Don Cavalieri showed that sea ice changes were not uniform around Antarctica. Most of the growth from 1978 to 2010 occurred in the Ross Sea, which gained a little under 5,300 square miles of sea ice per year, with more modest increases in the Weddell Sea and Indian Ocean. At the same time, the region of the Bellingshausen and Amundsen Seas lost an average of about 3,200 square miles of ice every year.

"Parkinson and Cavalieri said that the mixed pattern of ice growth and ice loss around the Southern Ocean could be due to changes in atmospheric circulation. Recent research points at the depleted ozone layer over Antarctica as a possible culprit. Ozone absorbs solar energy, so a lower concentration of this molecule can lead to a cooling of the stratosphere (the layer between six and 30 miles above the Earth's surface) over Antarctica. At the same time, the temperate latitudes have been warming, and the differential in temperatures has strengthened the circumpolar winds flowing over the Ross Ice Shelf. "Winds off the Ross Ice Shelf are getting stronger and stronger, and that causes the sea ice to be pushed off the coast, which generates areas of open water, polynyas,” said Josefino Comiso, a senior scientist at NASA Goddard. "The larger the coastal polynya, the more ice it produces, because in polynyas the water is in direct contact with the very cold winter atmosphere and rapidly freezes.” As the wind keeps blowing, the ice expands further to the north.

"This year's winter Antarctic sea ice maximum extent, reached two weeks after the Arctic Ocean's ice cap experienced an all-time summertime low, was a record high for the satellite era of 7.49 million square miles, about 193,000 square miles more than its average maximum extent for the last three decades. The Antarctic minimum extents, which are reached in the midst of the Antarctic summer, in February, have also slightly increased to 1.33 million square miles in 2012, or around 251,000 square miles more than the average minimum extent since 1979.

"The numbers for the southernmost ocean, however, pale in comparison with the rates at which the Arctic has been losing sea ice – the extent of the ice cover of the Arctic Ocean in September 2012 was 1.32 million square miles below the average September extent from 1979 to 2000. The lost ice area is equivalent to roughly two Alaskas.

"Parkinson said that the fact that some areas of the Southern Ocean are cooling and producing more sea ice does not disprove a warming climate. "Climate does not change uniformly: The Earth is very large and the expectation definitely would be that there would be different changes in different regions of the world,” Parkinson said. "That's true even if overall the system is warming.” Another recent NASA study showed that Antarctic sea ice slightly thinned from 2003 to 2008, but increases in the extent of the ice balanced the loss in thickness and led to an overall volume gain.

"The new research, which used laser altimetry data from the Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat), was the first to estimate sea ice thickness for the entire Southern Ocean from space. Records of Antarctic sea ice thickness are much patchier than those of the Arctic, due to the logistical challenges of taking regular measurements in the fierce and frigid waters around Antarctica. The field data collection is mostly limited to research icebreakers that generally only travel there during spring and summer – so the sole means to get large-scale thickness measurements is from space. "We have a good handle of the extent of the Antarctic sea ice, but the thickness has been the missing piece to monitor the sea ice mass balance,” said Thorsten Markus, one of the authors of the study and Project Scientist for ICESat-2, a satellite mission designed to replace the now defunct ICESat. ICESat-2 is scheduled to launch in 2016. "The extent can be greater, but if the sea ice gets thinner, the volume could stay the same." "
 
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