Month: November 2015

I see that the news item about a recent paper measuring Antarctic ice melt continues getting a lot of traction.
See my post of yesterday for more context.

Quick summary: new paper uses data sets that end in 2008 to assert that Antarctica is, overall, gaining mass, and not contributing to sea level rise. Yet, very accurate satellite measures of sea level show an accelerating rise (not to mention the water up around people’s ankles in Miami and elsewhere..)  So what’s up?

Here is an explainer from Richard Alley of Penn State:

The study is interesting, and Jay Zwally has done good work over many years on this topic. But, the consensus Shepherd et al paper, on which Jay is a coauthor, came up with an answer that I think differs from the new one by more than the updates in the isostatic corrections (note that if you need background on any of this, I can send more).  So, this new paper is at least somewhat at odds with multiple other lines of evidence.  The new work could be right; all of this is difficult and the error bars are sometimes large and difficult to quantify exactly, but as noted below, you probably are better starting with the multi-sensor/multi-parameter/multi-group answer (actually, you’re better going to the IPCC report).  

Let me give an analogy, and then go back to comments on Jay’s study: In the Shepherd et al IMBIE paper, the average rate of mass loss from the ice sheets over the 20 years covered was 0.6 mm/yr of sea-level rise.  The total size of the ice sheets is a bit over 60 m of potential sea-level rise, so at that rate, the ice sheets would take over 100,000 years to disappear, which is a loss of 0.001% per year.  The equivalent for a professor on a diet would be losing 1/3 of one typical potato chip per year.  That this is measurable is fantastic; that there might be some uncertainty and a different way to interpret that signal is not impossible.

You can see the difficulty in the measurement Jay is making.  There is a history of satellite degradation (the laser in the satellite was burning out, and that affected how easily the reflection from the ice sheet could be seen), and that raises concern about changes in the measurement arising from causes other than changes in surface elevation.  The data disagree with published results on change in surface elevation of Lake Vostok from GPS on the surface.  And, there are other technical details that could be discussed and that could involve errors. Zwally and company believe they solved these problems, the reviewers and editors approved this, but it is one paper, and there is still a large body of literature including the IMBIE paper that points in a somewhat different direction. Almost always, the best is to start with the assessed science (IPCC, or the whole IMBIE team) and work from there, so this new paper really shouldn’t change your starting point. 

Continue reading “More on Antarctic Ice Melt”

Barack Obama has a promising career in stand-up once he’s done with this President thing.

Note: video  above is somewhat repetitive with a few highlights.

Yahoo News:

Appearing on Broadway for one night only: Barack Obama, in a solo comedy act roasting the Republican Party.

The president left a crowd of more than 1,300 in stiches on Monday night at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, home to the hit musical “Hamilton” about Founding Father Alexander Hamilton. The cast staged a special performance for a Democratic National Committee fundraiser, with Obama as the encore.
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Tweaking Republicans who question climate change, Obama likened it to having 99 out of 100 doctors tell someone they have diabetes and having that person brush it off as a conspiracy.

“All 99 of those doctors got together — with Obama — to try to prevent me from having bacon and doughnuts,” Obama said to laughter in the ornate Times Square theater. “It’d be funny — except this is about climate change. This was an analogy.”

He recalled incredulously how a GOP senator stood on the floor of the Senate with a snowball to question global warming, and whipped out a phrase perhaps borrowed from one of his daughters. “It’s cray!” he said.

UPDATE – Washington Post:

The administration is preparing to reject a cross-border permit for the project aimed at transporting hundreds of thousands of barrels of heavy crude oil from Canada’s oil sands region to Gulf Coast refineries, according to several individuals who have been briefed but spoke on the condition of anonymity because the White House’s decision has not been announced. In asking for a delay, TransCanada could hand the issue, which has come to symbolize the broader battle over how the United States should address climate change, to the next U.S. president.

The Nebraska Public Service Commission is reviewing the pipeline’s route in the state after residents there challenged the state’s approval process for the project, and TransCanada argued in a letter to Secretary of State John F. Kerry that it would be “appropriate” to delay any federal decision until the Nebraska route is settled. The company first applied for a presidential permit seven years ago.

TransCanada’s president and chief executive, Russ Girling, noted Monday that when residents challenged the approval process for the pipeline in Nebraska’s courts, “the State Department found it appropriate to suspend its review until that dispute was resolved. We feel under the current circumstances a similar suspension would be appropriate.” The Nebraska review, the company said, could take between seven and 12 months.

A State Department official said officials were reviewing the letter.

Earlier Monday, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said that “our expectation at this point . . . is that the president will make a decision before the end of his administration on the Keystone pipeline, but when exactly that will be I don’t know at this point.”

Obviously, with the price of oil as low as it is today, the incentive to keep pushing on the pipeline deal is much lower than a few years ago.  There are complicating factors..

CNNMoney:

Given the (oil) price plunge, there’s also less urgency to ramp up production of the Canadian oil that Keystone XL would transport. Continue reading “Keystone Pipeline Suspended”

Climate Nexus Press advisory:

Cyclone Chapala—a rare Middle Eastern cyclone—is poised to make landfall in Yemen as a Category 1 or 2 storm early Tuesday morning. It brings a dangerous storm surge, torrential rain, flooding and mudslides to Mukalla, a coastal city of 300,000 people who have likely never experienced a storm of this magnitude. It has already taken three lives in Socotra, an island 368 km off Yemen’s coast.

If predictions prove correct, Chapala will be the first ever hurricane-strength cyclone on record to hit Yemen and has the potential to cause significant damage and loss of life. The eye of Chapala will likely pass 50 miles south of Mukalla, producing a two meter storm surge and 500mm (20 in) of rainfall in a 48 hour period, five times greater than its average rainfall over an entire year, 100mm (4in).

Cyclone Gonu in 2007 is the only hurricane-strength cyclone in modern records to affect the Arabian Peninsula, and there are only four observations in the scientific literature of tropical storm surge or storm tide in the Arabian Sea. Chapala is fed by record warm ocean temperatures fueled by an extreme El Niño and boosted by global warming.

As stated by Bob Henson at Weather Underground, “It is difficult to overstate the rarity and gravity of this event: a hurricane-strength storm striking near a large, ancient city, situated near mountains, with no modern experience in dealing with tropical cyclones. Although Hurricane Patricia got much more media attention, Chapala may end up bringing more damage and misery by far.”

Continue reading “Chapala is a Rare Beast in Arabian Sea”

George Monbiot in the Guardian:

I’ve often wondered how the media would respond when eco-apocalypse struck. I pictured the news programmes producing brief, sensational reports, while failing to explain why it was happening or how it might be stopped. Then they would ask their financial correspondents how the disaster affected share prices, before turning to the sport. As you can probably tell, I don’t have an ocean of faith in the industry for which I work. What I did not expect was that they would ignore it.

A great tract of Earth is on fire. It looks as you might imagine hell to be. The air has turned ochre: visibility in some cities has been reduced to 30 metres. Children are being prepared for evacuation in warships; already some have choked to death. Species are going up in smoke at an untold rate. It is almost certainly the greatest environmental disaster of the 21st century – so far.
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What I’m discussing is a barbecue on a different scale. Fire is raging across the 5,000km length of Indonesia. It is surely, on any objective assessment, more important than anything else taking place today. And it shouldn’t require a columnist, writing in the middle of a newspaper, to say so. It should be on everyone’s front page. It is hard to convey the scale of this inferno, but here’s a comparison that might help: it is currently producing more carbon dioxide than the US economy. And in three weeks the fires have released more CO₂ than the annual emissions of Germany.

But that doesn’t really capture it. This catastrophe cannot be measured only in parts per million. The fires are destroying treasures as precious and irreplaceable as the archaeological remains being levelled by Isis. Orangutans, clouded leopards, sun bears, gibbons, the Sumatran rhinoceros and Sumatran tiger, these are among the threatened species being driven from much of their range by the flames. But there are thousands, perhaps millions, more.

Quartz:

The fires in Indonesia that are creating hellish amounts of toxic smoke are also doing their job: clearing land. This year they’ve removed about 21,000 square kilometers (8,100 square miles) of forests and peatland, according to the country’s National Space and Aviation Agency (link in Indonesian).

Continue reading “Indonesia’s Fires: Is this the Biggest Climate Story of the Year?”

New study last week threw a curve into our understanding of Antactic ice loss.  Good discussion ongoing over at Stefan Rahmstorf’s facebook page.  Stefan leads off with :

Interesting new study – if this holds up, then Antarctica is still gaining mass since the end of the last Ice Age due to increased snowfall. And modern global warming has caused ice loss, but not yet enough to tip the overall balance. If the latter turns out to be true, we have a problem of understanding the contributions to the observed modern sea-level rise. If less (or none) is coming from Antarctica, more must be coming from other sources.

Complicated issue, sure to be distorted by deniers. Let’s keep it simple.

What no one is arguing about is that sea level is rising, and that water is coming from somewhere.

Sea level rise per satellite:

So, as Dr. Rahmstorf mentions, the argument here is a bit of an ongoing shell game of trying to figure out exactly where this new water is coming from – whether from Greenland, Antarctica, or ongoing thermal expansion of oceans.  This entails teasing some fairly faint signals out of complex data.

But wait, there’s more:

Christian Science Monitor:

A new NASA study found that Antarctica has been adding more ice than it’s been losing, challenging other research, including that of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that concludes that Earth’s southern continent is losing land ice overall.

In a paper published in the Journal of Glaciology on Friday, researchers from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, the University of Maryland in College Park, and the engineering firm Sigma Space Corporation offer a new analysis of satellite data that show a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001 in the Antarctic ice sheet.

That gain slowed to 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008.

Nature:

Zwally and his colleagues used data on the changing height of the ice-sheet surface from the European Space Agency’s European Remote Sensing radar satellite between 1992 and 2001, and from NASA’s ICESat laser-ranging satellite between 2003 and 2008.

A question that arises is, how does this square with more recent, satellite based studies that have indicated Antarctica as a whole is losing mass?

Science Daily April 30, 2015:

During the past decade, Antarctica’s massive ice sheet lost twice the amount of ice in its western portion compared with what it accumulated in the east, according to Princeton University researchers who came to one overall conclusion — the southern continent’s ice cap is melting ever faster.

Continue reading “Keeping it Simple on Sea Level Rise”

Description:

Right Wing Watch reports on the extreme rhetoric and activities of key right-wing figures and organizations by showing their views in their own words. In this video, Ted Cruz tells Glenn Beck that belief in climate change is not a scientific position, but a religious one.

RightWingWatch:

Yesterday we reported that GOP presidential hopefuls Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee and Bobby Jindal are all scheduled to speak at an upcoming “National Religious Liberties Conference” in Iowa next week that has been organized by far-right pastor Kevin Swanson, who has openly and repeatedly defended laws that impose the capital punishment on gay people.

Given that the chief organizer of this event holds such views, it should comes as no surprise to discover that several of the other scheduled speakers share similar views, in particular Phil Kayser, pastor of Dominion Covenant Church, and Joel McDurmon, president of the Christian Reconstructionist organization American Vision, which espouses the Christian Reconstructionist view that “men must choose in their civil affairs to be governed by God’s law” as explicitly set out in the Old Testament.

– See more at: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/cruz-jindal-and-huckbee-join-multiple-speakers-who-want-gays-put-death#sthash.y5ufTIXv.dpuf