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 Climate change ground zeroAustralia Is Committing Climate Suicide By Richard Flanagan Jan. 3, 2020, 2:55 a.m. ET BRUNY ISLAND, Tasmania — Australia today is ground zero for the climate catastrophe. Its glorious Great Barrier Reef is dying, its world-heritage rain forests are burning, its giant kelp forests have largely vanished, numerous towns have run out of water or are about to, and now the vast continent is burning on a scale never before seen. The images of the fires are a cross between “Mad Max” and “On the Beach”: thousands driven onto beaches in a dull orange haze, crowded tableaux of people and animals almost medieval in their strange muteness — half-Bruegel, half-Bosch, ringed by fire, survivors’ faces hidden behind masks and swimming goggles. Day turns to night as smoke extinguishes all light in the horrifying minutes before the red glow announces the imminence of the inferno. Flames leaping 200 feet into the air. Fire tornadoes. Terrified children at the helm of dinghies, piloting away from the flames, refugees in their own country. The fires have already burned about 14.5 million acres — an area almost as large as West Virginia, more than triple the area destroyed by the 2018 fires in California and six times the size of the 2019 fires in Amazonia. Canberra’s air on New Year’s Day was the most polluted in the world partly because of a plume of fire smoke as wide as Europe. Scientists estimate that close to half a billion native animals have been killed and fear that some species of animals and plants may have been wiped out completely. Surviving animals are abandoning their young in what is described as mass “starvation events.” At least 18 people are dead and grave fears are held about many more. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story All this, and peak fire season is only just beginning. As I write, a state of emergency has been declared in New South Wales and a state of disaster in Victoria, mass evacuations are taking place, a humanitarian catastrophe is feared, and towns up and down the east coast are surrounded by fires, all transport and most communication links cut, their fate unknown. An email that the retired engineer Ian Mitchell sent to friends on New Year’s Day from the small north Victoria community of Gipsy Point speaks for countless Australians at this moment of catastrophe: “All we and most of Gipsy Point houses still here as of now. We have 16 people in Gipsy pt. No power, no phone no chance of anyone arriving for 4 days as all roads blocked. Only satellite email is working We have 2 bigger boats and might be able to get supplies ‘esp fuel at Coota. We need more able people to defend the town as we are in for bad heat from Friday again. Tucks area will be a problem from today, but trees down on all tracks, and no one to fight it. We are tired, but ok. But we are here in 2020! Love Us” The bookstore in the fire-ravaged village of Cobargo, New South Wales, has a new sign outside: “Post-Apocalyptic Fiction has been moved to Current Affairs.” And yet, incredibly, the response of Australia’s leaders to this unprecedented national crisis has been not to defend their country but to defend the coal industry, a big donor to both major parties — as if they were willing the country to its doom. While the fires were exploding in mid-December, the leader of the opposition Labor Party went on a tour of coal mines expressing his unequivocal support for coal exports. The prime minister, the conservative Scott Morrison, went on vacation to Hawaii. Since 1996 successive conservative Australian governments have successfully fought to subvert international agreements on climate change in defense of the country’s fossil fuel industries. Today, Australia is the world’s largest exporter of both coal and gas. It recently was ranked 57th out of 57 countries on climate-change action. In no small part Mr. Morrison owes his narrow election victory earlier this year to the coal-mining oligarch Clive Palmer, who formed a puppet party to keep the Labor Party — which had been committed to limited but real climate-change action — out of government. Mr. Palmer’s advertising budget for the campaign was more than double that of the two major parties combined. Mr. Palmer subsequently announced plans to build the biggest coal mine in Australia. Since Mr. Morrison, an ex-marketing man, was forced to return from his vacation and publicly apologize, he has chosen to spend his time creating feel-good images of himself, posing with cricketers or his family. He is seen far less often at the fires’ front lines, visiting ravaged communities or with survivors. Mr. Morrison has tried to present the fires as catastrophe-as-usual, nothing out of the ordinary. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story This posture seems to be a chilling political calculation: With no effective opposition from a Labor Party reeling from its election loss and with media dominated by Rupert Murdoch — 58 percent of daily newspaper circulation — firmly behind his climate denialism, Mr. Morrison appears to hope that he will prevail as long as he doesn’t acknowledge the magnitude of the disaster engulfing Australia. Mr. Morrison made his name as immigration minister, perfecting the cruelty of a policy that interns refugees in hellish Pacific-island camps, and seems indifferent to human suffering. Now his government has taken a disturbing authoritarian turn, cracking down on unions, civic organizations and journalists. Under legislation pending in Tasmania, and expected to be copied across Australia, environmental protesters now face up to 21 years in jail for demonstrating. “Australia is a burning nation led by cowards,” wrote the leading broadcaster Hugh Riminton, speaking for many. He might have added “idiots,” after Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack blamed the fires on exploding horse manure. Such are those who would open the gates of hell and lead a nation to commit climate suicide. More than one-third of Australians are estimated to be affected by the fires. By a significant and increasing majority, Australians want action on climate change, and they are now asking questions of the growing gap between the Morrison government’s ideological fantasies and the reality of a dried-out, rapidly heating, burning Australia. The situation is eerily reminiscent of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, when the ruling apparatchik were all-powerful but losing the fundamental, moral legitimacy to govern. In Australia today, a political establishment, grown sclerotic and demented on its own fantasies, is facing a monstrous reality which it has neither the ability nor the will to confront. Mr. Morrison may have a massive propaganda machine in the Murdoch press and no opposition, but his moral authority is bleeding away by the hour. On Thursday, after walking away from a woman asking for help, he was forced to flee the angry, heckling residents of a burned-out town. A local conservative politician described his own leader’s humiliation as “the welcome he probably deserved.” As Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, once observed, the collapse of the Soviet Union began with the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in 1986. In the wake of that catastrophe, “the system as we knew it became untenable,” he wrote in 2006. Could it be that the immense, still-unfolding tragedy of the Australian fires may yet prove to be the Chernobyl of climate crisis? Richard Flanagan won the Man Booker Prize for “The Narrow Road to the Deep North.” His latest novel is “First Person.” |
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Glaciers melting A fictional 'university' incorrectly claims that glaciers are growing in the Montana park. Karin Kirk Friday, September 13, 2019 Glacier National Park Rebutting myths about climate change is an endless game of whack-a-mole. But one side-effect is that each dose of misinformation can prompt a look at the real science, and offer a reason to share credible, up-to-date information that might not have gotten much attention were it not for the myth. After encountering several social media references that glaciers are growing in my home state of Montana, I dug in to find the origin of the myth, and check in with scientists for an update on the status of Glacier National Park’s namesake features. The myth: Glaciers are growing in Glacier National Park, and the National Park Service doesn’t want you to know about it. This alluring falsehood appeared in a denialist blog earlier this summer (June 2019) and quickly spread to several others. The “government is quietly seeking to conceal some of its hysterical claims,” reads one claim. “It appears that the National Park Service is trying to hide the fact that the glaciers are growing!” The reality: The glaciers in GNP are shrinking. The myth states that Montana’s cold, snowy winters and “extreme amounts of snowfall” have not only halted the decades-long trend of glacier retreat, but in fact, have caused glaciers to expand. If true, that would be welcome news. Alas, it isn’t. The U.S. Geological Survey spells it out in plain language: “Despite occasional big winters or frigid weeks that occur, the glaciers of GNP, like most glaciers worldwide, are melting as long-term average temperatures increase.” While Montana’s winters often are impressively cold, the state is warming at nearly twice the rate of the globe on average. Since 1895, NOAA data show the two counties that comprise Glacier National Park have warmed nearly 3 degrees F, a trend that is taking a heavy toll on the glaciers. Caitlyn Florentine, a glaciologist with the U.S. Geological Survey’s Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center, is one of several scientists charged with keeping an eye on the park’s glaciers. She described the methods used to keep track of the glaciers, from analysis of aerial photography and satellite imagery, to boots-on-the-ice measurements of glacial ice volume. “It’s measurement-intensive,” she said in a video call from her West Glacier office. Despite recent cold winters, warmer-than-average summer temperatures have been erasing all the wintertime gains, and then some. Florentine noted that she and other scientists, comparing measurements from benchmark glaciers in the Northern Rockies, Cascades, and Alaska, found all the glaciers to be losing mass, even though they are at different elevations, latitudes, and climate regimes. Florentine summarized the findings as an “overall, consistent trend of mass loss” which she described as “pretty striking, considering that the benchmark glaciers are in such different climate settings.” Echoing USGS, the National Park Service is unequivocal on its website: “the park’s glaciers are all getting smaller,” explains the park’s webpage about glaciers. The page about climate change bears a stark headline: “This rapid rate of warming is melting the park’s glaciers, increasing the severity and likelihood of wildfires, and shifting wildlife habitat.” The caption on a graph of CO2 and temperature over the past 400,000 years leaves no doubt about the cause of warming: “In the past century, human activities have emitted a significant amount of CO2, which is causing the Earth to heat up – and glaciers to melt – at an alarming rate.” The Park Service changed three signs to reflect updated scientific projections about glacier behavior. One element of deliberate misinformation is that it often contains a grain of truth. That’s the case with this myth, too. This story appears to have been triggered when the Park Service changed three signs about projected dates when the glaciers might melt completely. These signs said that the glaciers could be gone by 2020. We now know that’s not the case. The signs have been updated to say, “When they will completely disappear, however, depends on how and when we act.” New park sign The National Park Service updated the text on some of the park’s displays to reflect improved scientific understanding of the behavior of shrinking glaciers. (Image: Courtesy of Tosha Lawrence, Visitor Services Assistant, Glacier National Park) Another sign that used to have the 2020 date now reads, “Some glaciers melt faster than others, but one thing is consistent: the glaciers in the park are shrinking.” Why were the predictions revised? The original estimates of the timing of glacier melt were based on two things: modeled projections of the glaciers’ response to warming, and direct observations of glacial retreat. A 2003 report was based on modeling a scenario of doubling pre-industrial atmospheric CO2 levels by 2030, which would have melted the park’s major glaciers – and presumably the minor ones, too – by 2030. After publication of that report, field observations showed glacier melt to be years ahead of the projections, causing scientists in 2010 to revise their “end date” to 2020. This 2020 date was then put on signs in the park, educating visitors about the observations of rapid ice loss resulting from global warming. New science means new signs. The death throes of glaciers are an urgent research topic, as streamflow, water supplies, aquatic habitat, and albedo feedback all hinge on the presence of glaciers. Thus, new research continues to shed light on the subject. A 2017 USGS report suggests that as glaciers retreat upward in elevation, they become more resistant to melting. The residual parts of the glaciers are higher, more shaded, and receive more snow deposition from avalanches and windblown snow. Because of these factors, these glacier remnants appear more capable of withstanding higher temperatures, compared to the thinner, lower-elevation parts of the glaciers that underwent rapid melt. Glaciers are “dynamic and flowing landforms,” explained Florentine, and new understanding of the intricacies of glacier retreat can help clarify why the remaining glaciers are more persistent than once thought. This is just one of many examples where interpretive signs in the national parks are updated to reflect emerging science. Updated signs portrayed as evidence of government conspiracy. Loathe to let actual science get in the way of a good story, some climate contrarians have played up the idea that the updated signs are evidence that the government had been withholding the truth from the public. As the myth was repeated across multiple denier websites, the situation was described as the Park Service’s being “forced to admit” it had been wrong and “scrambling to remove the signs without their visitors noticing.” “National park officials quietly remove climate change alarmist signs after cold winters sink narrative,” announced a headline on a website that describes itself as a source for “conservative ideas that are not available from traditional media outlets.” “They used all this to ramp up tourism and try to get more people in there before there wasn’t a glacier anymore!” wrote a right-wing talk show host. Contrarians claim that the glaciers are growing – based on their observations at a roadside overlook. The myth gets even more strange. A fake “university” claims to have sent a “delegation” of volunteers to check up on the glaciers and see for themselves. The so-called university reported that in 2018 “it quickly became clear that the glaciers have grown substantially in recent years.” Various blog posts make claims of the expansion of the Grinnell and Jackson glaciers by 25 or 30 percent or more since 2009. The evidence presented is a single, blurry photograph snapped from an overlook along a popular park road, and a video that compares a cell phone photo to an image of Grinnell Glacier on a park recycling bin. When asked if these assertions are true, Florentine was resolute: “No,” she said, shaking her head. “That’s why we turn to science.” Florentine described the work of the USGS as “systematic and reproducible,” a far cry from snapping a photo from the side of the road. The site that made these claims turns out to be mostly that of a single person who writes a blog espousing libertarian themes, while crediting himself as “the only research institution challenging the government’s Glacier Park climate hysteria.” The blog post goes on to chastise the media for ignoring its assertions: “No mainstream news outlet has done any meaningful reporting regarding the apparent stabilization and recovery of the glaciers in GNP over the past decade.” Evidence of glacial retreat comes from decades of measurements. Fortunately, the topic is getting due attention from legitimate scientists. Extensive measurements of Glacier’s glaciers were made in 1966, 1998, 2005, and 2015. Furthermore, Sperry Glacier is monitored in size and volume twice a year. The cumulative dataset spanning 50 years of glacier monitoring was released in 2017 and is freely available to the public. No need for imaginary secrecy. As for reports that Grinnell and Jackson glaciers are growing, data clearly show that’s not the case. Both glaciers have gotten progressively smaller, and their overall footprints shrank by 8.4% and 5.8% respectively, in the 10-year period between 2005 and 2015. Were it true that Jackson glacier had grown by 30% since 2009, the glacier would be larger now than it was in the 1990s. If that were actually happening, it would be welcome news, and as the blog author hints, it would indeed be newsworthy. But – and this bears repeating – the claim is false. Grinnell Glacier A comparison of the Grinnell Glacier in 1910 and 2017. More paired images are available from the USGS Repeat Photography Project. Glaciers worldwide are shrinking. While contrarians often use cherry-picked data to distract from the overall stark trends of ice loss around the world, it’s worth keeping in mind that glaciers are not dwindling just in Glacier National Park. Glaciers are receding rapidly all around the world: in the Himalayas, Greenland, the Alps, Africa, South America, and Antarctica. Reflecting on the worldwide loss of glaciers, Florentine underscores “how critical this science is,” particularly when informing policymakers about responses to climate change. “It’s really important to have scientific information so we get the numbers right,” she said. |
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Speaking of glaciers 40-Year-Old Radar Data Shows Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier Is Melting Faster Than We Realized Kiona N. Smith www.forbes.com It turns out you can teach old radar data new tricks. Vintage film of airborne radar surveys from the 1970s are helping modern geophysicists understand how ice sheets flow and how seawater erodes the ice from below. Equipped with the vintage data alongside modern images, computer models suggest that the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica is melting away even faster than anyone realized. As a species, we've spent decades pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and it's wreaking havoc on our planet's climate. But all that CO2 isn't just warming up the air; it's warming the oceans, too, and the polar ice caps and glaciers that hold 68.7% of our planet's fresh water are melting into the oceans and raising sea levels. In order to adapt to, plan for, and mitigate what's to come, we need to know exactly how quickly the world's oceans are rising. To know that, we need to know how quickly the glaciers and ice sheets at the poles are melting — and that depends partly on erosion and movement happening at the bottom of the ice sheets, where the ice meets continental shelf rock or warm, moving seawater. "When we model ice sheet behavior and sea-level projections into the future, we need to understand the process at the base of the ice sheet that made the changes we're seeing," said geophysicist Dustin Schroeder of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment in a recent statement to the press. Schroeder and his colleagues need to know how exactly how to model those processes accurately on a scale of decades. But those processes are hidden beneath the ice, so getting a good look at them is a challenge. Radar helps, because it can penetrate the ice and reveal the mountains, volcanoes, and lakes hidden beneath — as well as the layers of ice that make up the sheet, and the channels and cavities where water has melted away parts of the ice. A series of airborne survey flights from 1971 to 1979 gave scientists their first look at the structures hidden beneath the ice of Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica. "These original analog radar profiles [...] were instrumental in the discovery and early understanding of, for example, subglacial lakes, ice-shelf processes, ice-core climate records, and the topography of the underlying continent," Schroeder and his colleagues wrote in their paper in the journal PNAS. All that data — in the form of a stack of vintage 35mm film reels — has been sitting in storage at Cambridge University since the last survey flight in 1979. To get a better look at how Thwaites Glacier has changed over time, Schroeder and his colleagues digitized those old film reels, fixing some of the problems that led to the loss of a lot of detail and resolution in earlier attempts at scanning and copying the radar images. If you want to understand the lives of our planet's vanishing glaciers, Thwaites is one of the most important glaciers to get to know. Thwaites Glacier is a broad slab of ice flowing downhill and into west Antarctica's Pine Island Bay at a speed of about 2km (1.25 miles) per year. It's one of the fastest-moving — and most unstable — glaciers in Antarctica, and it flows alongside another large, rapidly changing (read: unstable and disappearing) glacier called Pine Island, on a stretch of coastline, the Walgreen Coast, which has become known as the "weak underbelly" of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Thwaites flows offshore in a tongue of floating ice, which regrounds itself on a ridge of land offshore. The part of the glacier that's grounded on the offshore ridge seems fairly stable, but the part that's floating between the ridge and the coast is exposed to ocean water — which was warmer than the ice even back when sea temperatures were cooler — and melting from the bottom. "This is a pretty hard-to-get-to area, and we're really lucky that they happened to fly across this ice shelf," said Schroeder in a recent statement to the press. By combining the newly-digitized vintage data with modern radar surveys from the last 10 to 20 years, Schroeder and his colleagues can now look back at nearly 50 years of changes in the Thwaites glacier both overall and at a very local scale. That information could help refine models of how glaciers flow and how they erode from beneath thanks to contact with seawater. And that, in turn, could help produce better models of how much fresh water is going to get dumped into the world's oceans, and how quickly it's going to happen, over the next few decades. The eastern ice shelf of the Thwaites Glacier seems to have been melting away from beneath much faster than anyone realized. Previous studies, based on measurements of changes in the height of the ice's surface, suggested that the ice shelf is thinning at a rate of about 25 meters (82 feet) a decade. That's a layer of ice as tall as a seven-story building eroding away every ten years. But according to the 1970s radar data, the ice shelf lost about 115 (plus or minus 62) meters of thickness in the 30 years from 1978 to 2009 — which means it's thinning away at about 40 meters per decade — the height of a 12-story building. Schroeder and his colleagues suggest that the recent surveys measuring the height of the ice surface were looking at the glacier on a large scale and missing important details as a result. The recent altimetry surveyes combined the surface heights of a part of Thwaites called the Eastern Ice Shelf and a neighboring region of ice called the Thwaites Ice Tongue into a single estimate. As a result, those studies missed the more drastic local thinning happening beneath the Eastern Ice Shelf, but the radar data are more detailed and localized. "You can really see [...] how these ocean currents have melted the ice shelf," said Schroeder in a statement, "not just in general, but exactly where and how." The speed at which ice is flowing seaward on the Thwaites Eastern Ice Shelf has slowed in the last 10 years, but Schroeder and his colleagues' data suggests that it won't be enough to stabilize the precarious, eroding glaciers on the Walgreen Coast, which could face even more thinning, ultimately destabilizing the rest of the ice shelf in the coming decades. But now that geophysicists know how those processes are happening, humanity is a little better equipped to plan for future sea level rise and perhaps take steps to mitigate it. That, in large part, is thanks to 40-year-old radar images on analog film. "It was surprising how good the old data is," said Schroeder in a recent statement to the press. They were very careful and thoughtful engineers, and it's much richer, more modern looking, than you would think." |
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Ah yes m.youtube.com |
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Oz again January 4, 2020 — 10.03am By Updated Standing on the waterfront at Mallacoota on Friday morning, waiting with his wife and 10-year-old son to board a tender that would take them out to HMAS Choules offshore, Nick Ritar had time to ponder the utter strangeness of what was unfolding in the normally idyllic beach town just south of the NSW border. “We are Australia’s first climate refugees,” he told the Herald by phone from the wharf, where groups of holiday-makers were being bussed down from the local cinema. Nick Ritar, wife Kirsten Bradley and their son Ashar, 10, await evacuation from Mallacoota. Nick Ritar, wife Kirsten Bradley and their son Ashar, 10, await evacuation from Mallacoota. “We are the first of many." Three days earlier, on New Year's Eve, Ritar had seen the many-hued shades of hell at first hand. Sheltering in the house of a friend, he and his family watched as the sky itself succumbed to the inferno roaring up out of the bush from the south-west. What had been a smoke-tinged but otherwise near-normal dawn just after five had given way by 7am to a deepening gloom. By 8am “it was pitch black, darker than the darkest night”. The towering pyrocumulus clouds generated by the fire had obliterated the sun, leaving the group of 14 family members and friends in darkness for two hours, before blood-red light returned as flames swept up to the edges of the town. By that point, Ritar recalled, “burning embers started falling and houses were starting to get lost”. The blood-red light in Mallacoota. The blood-red light in Mallacoota.Nick Ritar Thousands of residents and holidaymakers huddled for safety on the beach, some taking to the water in small boats before the fire moved around the town, leaving a violent orange sky in its wake. Further up the coast, at the fishing village of Bermagui in New South Wales, ABC broadcaster Virginia Trioli also saw the darkness descend. At 10am she told listeners: “It felt like midnight - you could not see the sunlight, it was terrifying.” All along the state’s south coast, from Bega in the far south through to Nowra, along the normally pristine beaches and rocky coves and through the picturesque villages of the hinterland, the story has been the same. 'We’re going to need a whole lot of love showered on the South Coast … The monster is not done with us yet.' Eurobodalla mayor Liz Innes The darkness that turned the middle of the day into night before a blood-red haze descended. Tens of thousands of holidaymakers taking refuge in surf clubs, sports clubs, civic centres and RSL memorial halls up and down the coast. In Malua Bay, up to 1000 holidaymakers and residents spending the night on a beach, clinging to the water’s edge, as homes went up in flames. In Rosedale, Mogo, Cobargo, Batemans Bay and Nelligen – houses lost, businesses and livelihoods destroyed, treasured memories obliterated. Historic villages and hamlets with their hearts torn out. And lives lost. These blazes, say experienced observers, like the former NSW fire and rescue chief Greg Mullins, are unprecedented in their ferocity and scale. The fires have been intense enough to generate madcap winds and updraughts so strong they can flip an eight tonne fire-truck on its roof, as happened on Monday near the Victorian-NSW border, killing 28-year-old Samuel McPaul as he fought the massive Green Valley blaze. A roadside scarred by the raging bushfires at Eurobodalla. A roadside scarred by the raging bushfires at Eurobodalla.Warwick Edgington Firefighting, says Mullins, is becoming “far more dangerous despite better trucks, better equipment, better uniforms. Logic would say in this day and age we would be far better-equipped to fight fires and we would be getting on top of it, but Mother Nature is bigger than any of us, bigger than any technology, and she is pretty bloody angry.” People on the south coast are telling him they have never seen the like. “Wherever I go – and I have been out fighting fires this season in Wollombi, Spencer, Grafton, the Blue Mountains, Bargo and Batemans Bay – people who I have never met are coming up to me and saying ‘good on you mate, we see now what you are talking about'.” What he’s been "talking about" is climate change. Earlier this year, Mullins was a key force behind the formation of the Emergency Leaders for Climate Action group, which brings together 29 former fire and emergency service chiefs who want to see stronger leadership on the matter. The warming of the planet has “created conditions for fires the likes of which we have never seen before”, Mullins says. That includes a 15 to 20 per cent reduction in rainfall on the South Coast in recent years, and fire seasons extending up to two months longer than they did in the the 1970s through to the '90s. “We have lost six times more homes than we have ever lost in the worst previous fire season in New South Wales history,” he says. “And it’s still going.” |
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My friend outside Sydney Just saying |
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and Hottest ever day recorded in Greater Sydney@BOM_au recorded maximum temperature of 48.9C at 3pm Previous record of 47.3C set in January 2018 |
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Greenland ice By Jonathan Amos BBC Science Correspondent, San Francisco Ice loss from 1992 to 2018 has occurred mostly around the coast (Imbie/ESA/Planetary Visions) Greenland is losing ice seven times faster than it was in the 1990s. The assessment comes from an international team of polar scientists who've reviewed all the satellite observations over a 26-year period. They say Greenland's contribution to sea-level rise is currently tracking what had been regarded as a pessimistic projection of the future. It means an additional 7cm of ocean rise could now be expected by the end of the century from Greenland alone. This threatens to put many millions more people in low-lying coastal regions at risk of flooding. It's estimated roughly a billion live today less than 10m above current high-tide lines, including 250 million below 1m. "Storms, if they happen against a baseline of higher seas - they will break flood defences," said Prof Andy Shepherd, of Leeds University. "The simple formula is that around the planet, six million people are brought into a flooding situation for every centimetre of sea-level rise. So, when you hear about a centimetre rise, it does have impacts," he told BBC News. Greenland's ice faces melting 'death sentence' UN panel signals red alert on 'Blue Planet' Antarctica's ice melt 'has accelerated' Greenland sea level contribution Presentational white space The British scientist is the co-lead investigator for Imbie - the Ice Sheet Mass Balance Inter-comparison Exercise. It's a consortium of 89 polar experts drawn from 50 international organisations. The group has reanalysed the data from 11 satellite missions flown from 1992 to 2018. These spacecraft have taken repeat measurements of the ice sheet's changing thickness, flow and gravity. The Imbie team has combined their observations with the latest weather and climate models. What emerges is the most comprehensive picture yet of how Greenland is reacting to the Arctic's rapid warming. This is a part of the globe that has seen a 0.75C temperature rise in just the past decade. Andy Shepherd: "Greenland and Antarctica are losing ice faster than we expected" The Imbie assessment shows the island to have lost 3.8 trillion tonnes of ice to the ocean since the start of the study period. This mass is the equivalent of 10.6mm of sea-level rise. What is more, the team finds an acceleration in the data. Whereas in the early 90s, the rate of loss was equivalent to about 1mm per decade, it is now running at roughly 7mm per decade. Imbie team-member Dr Ruth Mottram is affiliated to the Danish Meteorological Institute. She said: "Greenland is losing ice in two main ways - one is by surface melting and that water runs off into the ocean; and the other is by the calving of icebergs and then melting where the ice is in contact with the ocean. The long-term contribution from these two processes is roughly half and half." In an average year now, Greenland sheds about 250 billion tonnes of ice. This year, however, has been exceptional for its warmth. In the coastal town of Ilulissat, not far from where the mighty Jakobshavn Glacier enters the ocean, temperatures reached into the high 20s Celsius. And even in the ice sheet interior, at its highest point, temperatures got to about zero. "The ice loss this year was more like 370 billion tonnes," said Dr Mottram. Back in 2013, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - the authoritative body that reconciles all climate science - gave a mid-range projection for global sea level rise of about 60cm by 2100. A mixture of ice melt and expansion of warming water. But when Imbie published its companion review of Antarctica in 2018, it found the White Continent's contribution by 2100 was likely being underestimated by 10cm. Now, for Greenland, Imbie is saying the shortfall is 7cm. The IPCC will have to incorporate these updates when it releases its next major assessment report (AR6) of Earth's climate in a couple of years' time. Prof René Forsberg, from the Technical University of Denmark, said the Imbie exercise underlined the importance of flying satellites, especially those that can observe the top of Greenland, higher than 83 degrees North. Only two of the present fleet can, and one of those spacecraft is operating beyond its design life. "Most of the changes we've seen in Greenland have been in the west, south and east; and now it has slowly moved up to the north. So, yes, the next satellite in the European Union's Copernicus programme needs to go to higher latitudes, and this is being discussed by the EU and the European Space Agency," Prof Forsberg told BBC News. The new satellite system - for the moment known as Cristal, but to be called a Sentinel if it flies - would be a radar altimeter to measure the changing shape of Greenland. Imbie's Greenland analysis is published in the journal Nature. Its release has been timed to coincide with the annual COP climate convention taking place this year in Madrid, and with the American Geophysical Union meeting here in San Francisco, where leading Earth scientists have gathered. |
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pawntificator 05-Jan-20, 09:27 |
i.redd.it |
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pawntificator 05-Jan-20, 09:31 |
Arson is definitely more likely than your magical sky daddy "global warming" |
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Yup Obviously. |
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Anyway Arsonists suck. That’s why we need fewer people. |
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pawntificator 05-Jan-20, 12:38 |
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Exactly Well.... that and re-educating a tRumpie. But that’s about as likely as educating lichen. |
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pawntificator 06-Jan-20, 18:45 |
www.brisbanetimes.com.au Climate Eco-terrorists should face harsh penalties. |
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Ah yes Melting glaciers Ocean acidification Ocean current disruptions Greenland and Antarctica ice shelves melting Storm intensity increasing Permafrost not perma anymore Drought and changing rainfall patterns Mass extinctions Sea level rising I wonder how those arsonists manage to do all that. They are AMAXING! 🤪 |
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And yeah |
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pawntificator 06-Jan-20, 19:39 |
The rest of those will be fun, too. |
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zorroloco 06-Jan-20, 19:42 |
Deleted by inhis_service on 09-Jan-20, 10:25.
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pawntificator 06-Jan-20, 19:47 |
Deleted by inhis_service on 09-Jan-20, 10:26.
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But you said arson Human-caused climate change is worsening the wildfires scorching Australia, experts say. "Climate change is increasing bushfire risk in Australia by lengthening the fire season, decreasing precipitation and increasing temperature," according to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. The unprecedented fires, which have killed at least 25 people and destroyed 2,000 homes, have been burning since September. In all, about 15 million acres have burned across the country, an area roughly the size of West Virginia. While climate change might not ignite the fires, it is giving them the chance to turn into catastrophic blazes by creating warmer temperatures, increasing the amount of fuel (dried vegetation) available and reducing water availability because of higher evaporation, according to Climate Signals. 'Scale of disaster is enormous': Bush fires, politics intensify as Australia burns "There are many drivers of wildfires, but its increasingly clear that hotter, drier conditions play a big role in making them worse," said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, a climate research organization, in a tweet. "Southern Australia has seen rapid warming of around 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since 1950, making conditions ripe for devastating fires," he said. Recent extremely hot, dry conditions have also fueled the fires. According to the Bureau of Meteorology, 2019 was both the hottest and driest year ever measured in Australia. "Under these conditions, it is not at all surprising that extreme wildfires have been running out of control," said Robert Rohde, a lead scientist at Berkeley Earth, in a tweet. December was particularly harsh in Australia: It was one of the top two hottest months on record for the nation. Early start to season: Australia's bushfire season begins early and forcefully as its politicians differ over climate change "Australia has warmed by about 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) since records began in 1910," tweeted Columbia University climate scientist Kate Marvel. "This makes heat waves and fires more likely. It's not the sun. It's not volcanoes. It's not 'natural cycles.'" "There is no explanation for this – none – that makes sense besides emissions of heat-trapping gases," Marvel said. Climate change is also making droughts more likely to occur – and more severe when they do – in Australia. While Australia is no stranger to drought, climate change has exacerbated drought conditions so that when droughts occur, the conditions are in a much hotter climate and, in some cases, with lower precipitation, according to Climate Signals. The Climate Reality Project also reports that making the connection between global temperature rise and wildfires is also pretty simple science: Droughts dry out the land, killing plant life – which then also dries out itself, becoming far easier to ignite. Indeed, winter rainfall has been decreasing in southeastern Australia, while the country has been becoming hotter with more extreme heatwaves – ideal conditions for bushfires. Animals at risk: Bindi Irwin says her family's animal hospital is 'busier than ever' amid wildfires "If anyone tells you, 'This is part of a normal cycle' or 'we’ve had fires like this before,' smile politely and walk away, because they don’t know what they’re talking about," Greg Mullins, former Fire and Rescue commissioner of New South Wales, told the Sydney Morning Herald. "Climate change is super-charging our natural disaster risks," Mullins said. "I wish we were wrong, but we’re not." Texas Tech climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe explained in a tweet that "human-induced climate change is a threat multiplier. It takes existing risks and amplifies them beyond imagining, affecting every living thing on this planet, including us." |
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pawntificator 06-Jan-20, 19:55 |
Deleted by inhis_service on 09-Jan-20, 10:26.
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zorroloco 06-Jan-20, 19:59 |
Deleted by inhis_service on 09-Jan-20, 10:26.
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zorroloco 06-Jan-20, 20:00 |
Deleted by zorroloco on 09-Jan-20, 10:59.
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pawntificator 06-Jan-20, 20:05 |
Deleted by inhis_service on 09-Jan-20, 10:27.
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zorroloco 06-Jan-20, 20:10 |
Deleted by zorroloco on 06-Jan-20, 20:10.
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zorroloco 06-Jan-20, 20:10 |
Deleted by inhis_service on 09-Jan-20, 10:27.
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