The Antarctic ice sheet is likely to gain mass because of greater precipitation, while the Greenland ice sheet is likely7 to lose mass because the increase in runoff will exceed the precipitation increase.
Concerns have been expressed about the stability of the West Antarctic ice sheet because it is grounded below sea level. However, loss of grounded ice leading to substantial sea level rise from this source is now widely agreed to be very unlikely during the 21st century, although its dynamics are still inadequately understood, especially for projections on longer time-scales.
In the intervening years, more data has became available, especially gravity measurements from the GRACE satellite system. But in 2007, the 4th assessment Report (AR4) still qualified sea level rise estimates with the caveat “excluding rapid dynamical changes in ice flow” – an important point that climate deniers have deliberately chosen to ignore and exploit.
See more on this in Richard Alley’s recent lecture, which I’ll be revisiting in a future vid. Dr Alley is more concerned about West Antarctica than Greenland for the coming century. However, since 2012’s record surface melt on Greenland, and the emerging GRACE data showing Greenland with a 10 year doubling time on mass loss, there has been a renewed conversation about Greenland dynamics, and possible contributions to Sea level this century.
In a recent update, Dr. James Hansen warned specifically about change in Greenland mass loss that could lead to more rapid contributions than has been generally discussed.
Perceived authority2 in the case of ice sheets stems from ice sheet models used to simulate paleoclimate sea level change. However, paleoclimate ice sheet changes were initiated by weak climate forcings changing slowly over thousands of years, not by a forcing as large or rapid as human-made forcing this century. Moreover, in a paper submitted for publication (Hansen et al., 2013) we present evidence that even paleoclimate data do not support the degree of lethargy and hysteresis that exists in such ice sheet models.
Fig. 1 (above) shows the Greenland ice sheet mass change estimated by Shepherd et al. (2012). The input-output method calculates the difference between mass gained through snowfall and mass lost by sublimation, meltwater runoff, and discharge of ice into the ocean. This record and the analysis of satellite gravity measurements agree within their margins of error (see Shepherd et al., 2012). There are no satellite gravity data to confirm or refute the large amplitude of fluctuations prior to 2000 in Fig. 1, which are based on input-output calculations.
Fig. 1 shows that Greenland has been losing mass at a faster and faster rate over the past decade, with the recent rate corresponding to ~1 mm sea level per year (1 mm sea level = 360 Gt ice). The linear fit to the Shepherd et al. data in Fig. 1 yields a Greenland contribution to global sea level of about 30 cm by 2100.
The increasing Greenland mass loss in Fig. 1 can be fit just as well by exponentially increasing annual mass loss, a behavior that Hansen (2005, 2007) argues could occur because of multiple amplifying feedbacks as an ice sheet begins to disintegrate. A 10-year doubling time would lead to 1 meter sea level rise by 2067 and 5 meters by 2090. The dates are 2045 and 2057 for 5-year doubling time and 2055 and 2071 for a 7-year doubling time.
In light of Hansen’s calculations, the observations noted in the video, of an observed 10 year doubling by Dr. Jason Box are sobering. Dr Eric Rignot sounds a note of caution due to the magnitude of the 2012 melt, which may be an outlier. Nevertheless, Dr. Mike MacCracken, Dr. Box, and Dr. Tom Wagner have all alluded to an ongoing re-evaluation of of outlet glacier melt versus surface melt in Greenland dynamics.
One of the leading arguments against the proposed route of the Keystone Pipeline is that it runs across one of North America’s most critical water resources, the Ogallala Aquifer. What do we say, then, about a pipeline and shipping plan to bring the toxic Dilbit oil across 20 percent of the world’s fresh surface water?
What’s concerning is that with alternative routes like this one springing up, even a symbolic “win” on the Keystone project is just that – a hollow symbol.
Detroit Free Press ran a front page story on Sunday – managing to avoid the word “climate” in the entire piece.
Two oil projects in the works could significantly increase the amount of heavy crude oil moving on — and near — the Great Lakes, causing alarm among environmentalists because they involve the same heavy oil that was behind a $1-billion oil spill on the Kalamazoo River in 2010 that remains an ecological disaster.
The company fined for that spill — Canadian oil transport giant Enbridge — is behind one of the new projects. Its new venture would nearly double the amount of crude oil shipped on a major pipeline from Canada to Lake Superior — transporting more oil than the controversial Keystone XL pipeline that has caused an environmental outcry and fierce debate in Congress. The second project involves a refinery on Lake Superior’s shore building a dock to load oil barges, allowing the shipment of up to 13 million barrels of crude oil per year throughout the Great Lakes to Midwest refineries and markets beyond
Together, the projects would mean a new reality for the Great Lakes basin, heightening risks to the world’s most vital freshwater source, according to environmental groups.
Mongolian rapper “Gee” featuring Mongolian folk music band “Jonon” and singer “Bayaraa” performing “Minii nutgiig nadad uldee”. This song is about serious concerns in desertification. And tells people love nature and your country. (2011)
I’m supposed to be on a holiday and should let this one slide, but it’s too much. I was expecting fake skeptics to remain mostly silent in face of the ice massacre up north, but apparently they acutely sense how big this blow is to the remaining shred of their credibility, and so they upped the ante of misleading and distorting stupidity. Anyone can see and judge the silliness of paid shill Marc Morano, 5-sentence posts regurgitator/vomiter Steve Goddard and of course WUWT. But this Sunday Times article, written by well-known pseudo-journalist Jonathan Leake (search for his name on Deltoid) had a quote by presumed scientist John Christy that really got my hackles up:
Professor John Christy director of the Earth System Science Centre at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, said the Arctic had indeed warmed, but there was also anecdotal and other evidence suggesting similar melts from 1938-43 and on other occasions.
“Climate change is a murky science”, he said. “To some it’s an easy answer to say it’s due to extra green house gasses. To the rest of us, separating natural variability from human impacts remains a wicked problem.”
Commenters over at Skeptical Science quickly took this nonsense apart. First FrankD:
But fake Christian piety is not a new part of Barton’s schtick. I’ve been doing some research for an upcoming video on the connection between tobacco denial and climate denial. It’s amazing how many of the same characters we know and love keep cropping up.
Turns out, in his youth, the gentleman from Texas was (probably still is) the recipient of generous contributions from the Tobacco industry, and an enthusiastic part of the “tobacco health effects are junk science its just the gummint trying to mess with yore freedum” caucus. See the 90s era interview above with the late Peter Jennings.
You may heard about this clip of climate denier, oil errand boy and tobacco shill, “Smokey Joe” Barton thumping the Bible. If not, here it is.
Because I love the golden oldies, couldn’t resist Joe’s famous apology to BP for America’s arrogance in holding them responsible for the Gulf Oil spill.
Japan will probably become the largest solar market in the world after China this year, boosted by an incentive program that offers above-market rates for energy from renewable sources.
Commercial and utility-scale projects will boost solar installations to a range of 6.1 gigawatts to 9.4 gigawatts in 2013, exceeding an earlier forecast of 3.2 gigawatts to 4 gigawatts, Bloomberg New Energy Finance said in a research note.
“The upward revision was done because of the rapid increase in shipments seen last quarter as well as the fact that the pipeline of projects is even stronger than previously expected,” BNEF said in the report released March 29.
The forecast reflects the push by Japan to find alternative sources of energy due to the Fukushima nuclear crisis, which prompted the closure of all but two of the nation’s nuclear reactors.
The government began offering incentives last July through feed-in tariffs to encourage investments in energy sources such as wind and solar.
Lawson Inc. installed solar panels on the roofs of 1,000 of its convenience stores by the end of February and plans to set up systems for another 1,000 outlets, company spokesman Yuuki Takemoto said. Lawson uses panels by Solar Frontier K.K. and Panasonic Corp.
Lawson sells electricity generated from solar panels to utilities and plans to use the income for mroe energy-saving equipment, the spokesman said.
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“The feed-in tariff has been successful in sparking interest and potential for unprecedented growth in solar,” Travis Woodward, a Tokyo-based solar analyst at BNEF, said in an emailed message. “This large introduction of solar is significant enough to compliment other strategies to alleviate power demand issues from idling almost all nuclear plants in Japan. Solar system prices will need to come down closer to global average, however, to make a sustainable market.”
This is the full CSpan version. My eyes get moist listening, not because I miss Ms. Thatcher, I had no special fondness for her, but because I miss what we once had in pre-Fox America – a dialogue with intelligent conservatives who took the time to actually think, feel, reason, and deduct. A common set of basic human values, and a respect for fact and science.
Can you imagine a contemporary Republican making glowing mention of Darwin? (first 5 minutes)
It’s 36 minutes. Worth playing in the background, or if you don’t have time, see the Yale video I produced using this footage, and commentary below in another post.
In the video above, I contrasted the wreckage of Fox-encrusted, racist, theocratic, knee-jerk know-nothing, tea pottied nativist reflexes that “conservativism” has become, with something closer to actual conservatism as we used to know it – featuring Margaret Thatcher’s address to the United Nations in which she warned urgently about climate change. Thatcher had an actual science background, and shows in the video clips above just how much she was listening to purported “advice” from idiots like “Lord” Monckton.
“We must remember our duty to Nature before it is too late. That duty is constant. It is never completed. It lives on as we breathe. It endures as we eat and sleep, work and rest, as we are born and as we pass away. The duty to Nature will remain long after our own endeavors have brought peace to the Middle East. It will weigh on our shoulders for as long as we wish to dwell on a living and thriving planet, and hand it on to our children and theirs.” –Speech to World Climate Conference, November 6, 1990
More evidence of a gathering initiative to reclaim the “conserve” in “conservatism”. This week, former Reagan Secretary of State George Schultz cowrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal arguing the merits of a price on carbon – to begin reflecting something dimly approximating the actual costs to society of fossil fuel dependence.
Conservative economists George Schultz and Gary Becker wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Monday advocating for a revenue-neutral carbon tax on the grounds that it will level the playing field for energy producers and eliminate wasteful energy subsidies.
“Clearly, a revenue-neutral carbon tax would benefit all Americans by eliminating the need for costly energy subsidies while promoting a level playing field for energy producers,” wrote Schultz and Becker in the Journal.
Schultz and Becker invoked the conservative argument that fossil fuel energy producers should not receive any special privileges and should pay the full cost of their actions. In this case, that would mean paying for the social costs imposed on public health and the climate from emitting carbon dioxide.
Americans like to compete on a level playing field. All the players should have an equal opportunity to win based on their competitive merits, not on some artificial imbalance that gives someone or some group a special advantage.
We think this idea should be applied to energy producers. They all should bear the full costs of the use of the energy they provide. Most of these costs are included in what it takes to produce the energy in the first place, but they vary greatly in the price imposed on society by the pollution they emit and its impact on human health and well-being, the air we breathe and the climate we create. We should identify these costs and see that they are attributed to the form of energy that causes them.
At the same time, we should seek out the many forms of subsidy that run through the entire energy enterprise and eliminate them. In their place we propose a measure that could go a long way toward leveling the playing field: a revenue-neutral tax on carbon, a major pollutant. A carbon tax would encourage producers and consumers to shift toward energy sources that emit less carbon—such as toward gas-fired power plants and away from coal-fired plants—and generate greater demand for electric and flex-fuel cars and lesser demand for conventional gasoline-powered cars.
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In the case of administration by the IRS, an annual distribution could be made to every taxpayer and recipient of the Earned Income Tax Credit. In the case of the SSA, the distribution could be made, in terms proportionate to the dollars involved, to everyone either paying into the system or receiving benefits from it. In any case, checks to recipients should be identified as “Your carbon dividend.”
The authors recommended “reasonable and sustained” R&D in the energy area, but subsidies to particular energy forms should be phased out, and would “eliminate any program (loan guarantees, etc.) that tempts the government to get into commercial activities.”
When Utah’s newest congressman opined last month that he isn’t convinced that human activity is responsible for climate change, or that climate change is as much of a threat as scientists are warning it is, he took a position that a new poll suggests increasing numbers of his own Republican Party are abandoning. So, too, are more and more independents who lean toward the GOP.
The results of the poll by George Mason and Yale universities released last week show that more than three quarters of the 726 Republicans and independents polled favor using renewable energy much or somewhat more than it is today. Only slightly fewer indicated that moving toward alternative energies should begin immediately.
Without reading too much into the results of a single poll, it is possible to interpret them as an encouraging sign that the political polarization that has grown up around the science of climate change and development of renewable forms of energy finally is beginning to crack.
Given the gravity of the threat posed by the greenhouse-gas emissions that are causing the planet to warm, it would be welcome news indeed if the poll accurately reflects the beginnings of a bipartisan consensus on climate change and what should be done about it. For without that consensus, still more time will be wasted before the United States acts decisively to limit carbon emissions, time that scientists say is in dangerously short supply if the worst consequences of climate change are to be avoided.
This team of top climate scientists has concluded that our region of the country is hotter than it has ever been and that it will get hotter — because of humans. The last decade was the hottest the Southwestern U.S. has experienced — on average 2 degrees warmer than it had been historically. The scientists project a further increase over the next 50 years of 6 to 9 degrees if we do nothing.
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The report should be a wake-up call for leaders in Washington to overcome gridlock and start working on solutions. For models of how to proceed, they need only look to California and other states and cities that have begun to move forward in a bipartisan way.
The first step for policymakers — and for ordinary citizens too — is to understand the situation we face, which means carefully reading the National Climate Assessment. It may not be as gripping to look at or have the provocative appeal of a raging wildfire or another act of God, but the knowledge in this report is crucial to understanding how to change, to adapt, to prevent and to prepare for future disasters.
The Reagan administration was generally skeptical about costly environmental rules, but with respect to protection of the ozone layer, Reagan was an environmentalist hero. Under his leadership, the United States became the prime mover behind the Montreal Protocol, which required the phasing out of ozone-depleting chemicals.
There is a real irony here. Republicans and conservatives had ridiculed scientists who expressed concern about the destruction of the ozone layer. How did Ronald Reagan, of all people, come to favor aggressive regulatory steps and lead the world toward a strong and historic international agreement?
A large part of the answer lies in a tool disliked by many progressives but embraced by Reagan (and Mr. Obama): cost-benefit analysis. Reagan’s economists found that the costs of phasing out ozone-depleting chemicals were a lot lower than the costs of not doing so — largely measured in terms of avoiding cancers that would otherwise occur. Presented with that analysis, Reagan decided that the issue was pretty clear.
Despite the global economic slowdown, India’s economy has grown at a relatively brisk pace over the past five years and India is now the world’s fifth-largest energy consumer. It imports 75% of its energy (especially oil and petroleum products) today and expects to import 90% over the next decade. As a result, India is working hard to diversify its energy supplies. Still, the demand for energy keeps growing at a rate of 5%-6% annually. My country needs to secure more supplies to foster the socio-economic development of millions of our people who are still living in poverty.
Happily, the U.S. has experienced a boom in the production of natural gas. The ability to tap large formations by advanced technologies has yielded a large amount of this energy resource that achieves significant savings compared with diesel, especially when used in high-mileage heavy-duty vehicles.
Liquefied natural gas is transported more easily than other forms of energy. Significant investments, including some from India, have been made in technologies designed to harness LNG safely and efficiently and to build new facilities and ports to distribute it globally.
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The prospect of increased Indian investment in the U.S. natural-gas market will usher in a new era for a strong and mutually rewarding India-U.S. energy partnership. Through it, we will further consolidate our strategic ties and deepen cooperation for the benefit of millions of people in both countries.
Exporting natural gas would provide a tremendous benefit for the American economy, as it would expand market opportunities. Given the disparity in prices between domestic and foreign markets (Asia, Europe, and Latin America, for instance) those opportunities should prove to be plentiful even with the costs of transport tankers and liquefaction plants.
Message to consumers: Whether its tar sands or fracking, the environmental impacts locally are your problem. Shut about about price – the global market will set that.
Message to utilities: You won’t get a predictable price 10 years out on natural gas for that new generation station you are building. However, I can offer you wind power at a guaranteed rate for 25 years.
It would be a pretty one-sided affair if renewable energy technologies were not exploding as they are, and continuing to drop in price. One possible corollary: if you are a three dimensional chess playing President, you keep smiling and saying “All of the above” while the energy revolution gathers explosive steam….
