Month: May 2016

Cattle raising is often cited as a climate villain, but does it have to be?
Certainly the the huge factory farm operations have negative environmental impacts, but there might be another way.

There is a movement toward regenerative agriculture out there, which maintains that proper cattle management can be a carbon sequestering, soil building activity, much as it was when 50 million buffalo roamed over this continent. Something I hope to look into in the future.
Bud Ward briefs us.

Yale Climate Connections:

North Carolina farmer Suzanne Nelson has this thing about farming as a regenerative rather than an extractive business.

She also has a thing for cows.

Nelson says people should do what they love doing. For her, “for whatever reason, I love cows. I loved cows before I knew I loved cows.”

She says she now tends to Jersey dairy cows, St. Croix sheep, heritage pigs, laying hens, meat chicken, and, seasonally, turkeys. Cows, she believes, “are the only animal that can live on one acre and make four acres fertile.” She sees properly managed pastured livestock as “our number one antidote to climate change,” helping, with a boost from legumes and soil microbes, boost soil fertility and keep carbon in the soils and not excessively in the atmosphere.

A nine-year Carolina farmer, Nelson says in a four-minute video produced by the University of North Carolina’s Institute for the Environment that extreme weather events appear to be getting more extreme, summer droughts longer and worse. She’s trying to counter those trends on her 400-acre Haw River Ranch in Saxaphaw, in north-central North Carolina.

Investigating innovative solutions to climate is part of what I do here, and one more reason to support Dark Snow project.

https://vimeo.com/121045965

Best mountain footage ever? H/T to Jason Box.

Today’s headline in the Washington Post is another illustration of why readers and viewers at this blog get some of the best early-warning info on the issues of climate.

My video above, “Trouble at Totten Glacier” discussed a little known, but important and unstable, part of the Antarctic ice sheet, with a key, but very young, scientist, Jamin Greenbaum.  You saw it here first.

One more reason to support Dark Snow this year:

Washington Post:

Scientists ringing alarm bells about the melting of Antarctica have focused most of their attention, so far, on the smaller West Antarctic ice sheet, which is grounded deep below sea level and highly exposed to the influence of warming seas. But new research published in the journal Nature Wednesday reaffirms that there’s a possibly even bigger — if slower moving — threat in the much larger ice mass of East Antarctica.

The Totten Glacier holds back more ice than any other in East Antarctica, which is itself the biggest ice mass in the world by far. Totten, which lies due south of Western Australia, currently reaches the ocean in the form of a floating shelf of ice that’s 90 miles by 22 miles in area. But the entire region, or what scientists call a “catchment,” that could someday flow into the sea in this area is over 200,000 square miles in size — bigger than California.

Moreover, in some areas that ice is close to 2.5 miles thick, with over a mile of that vertical extent reaching below the surface of the ocean. It’s the very definition of vast.

Warmer waters in this area could, therefore, ultimately be even more damaging than what’s happening in West Antarctica — and the total amount of ice that could someday be lost would raise sea levels by as much as 13 feet.

“This is not the first part of East Antarctica that’s likely to show a multi-meter response to climate change,” said Alan Aitken, the new study’s lead author and a researcher with the University of Western Australia in Perth. “But it might be the biggest in the end, because it’s continually unstable as you go towards the interior of the continent.”

The research — which found that Totten Glacier, and the ice system of which it is part, has retreated many times in the past and contains several key zones of instability — was conducted in collaboration with a team of international scientists from the United States, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. A press statement about the study from the U.S. group, based at the University of Texas at Austin, described the study as showing that “vast regions of the Totten Glacier in East Antarctica are fundamentally unstable.”

Continue reading “More Trouble at Totten Glacier”

In case you were wondering.

CNN:

The mammoth inferno devastating northern Alberta has now destroyed more than 877,000 acres — more than four times the size of New York City.

Well over 1,700 firefighters are trying to get a grip on the blaze, which started May 1 near Fort McMurray.

But as of Wednesday, the fire is still 0% contained, the Alberta Agriculture and Forestry department said.

Even worse: The blaze is marching east toward Saskatchewan and will likely reach the province Wednesday, Alberta wildfire official Chad Morrison said.

Also near the path: major oil sands used to process bitumen, CNN partner CBC reported.

The inferno could actually burn through the winter and into next year, University of Alberta wildfire professor MIke Flannigan said.

The wildfire raging through northern Alberta has swelled in size and surged north of Fort McMurray, consuming an evacuated oil sands camp on Tuesday and threatening several other facilities in the region.

Continue reading “Alberta Fire Still “0 percent contained””

Reuters:

Republican presidential contender Donald Trump said on Tuesday he would renegotiate America’s role in the U.N. global climate accord, spelling potential doom for an agreement many view as a last chance to turn the tide on global warming.

A pull-out by the world’s second biggest carbon-emitting country would hobble the deal reached in Paris last December by nearly 200 nations, who for the first time in more than two decades found a common vision for curbing greenhouse gas emissions.

“I will be looking at that very, very seriously, and at a minimum I will be renegotiating those agreements, at a minimum. And at a maximum I may do something else,” the New York real estate mogul said in an interview with Reuters.

“But those agreements are one-sided agreements and they are bad for the United States.”

Trump said he did not believe China, the world’s top emitter of the carbon dioxide gas that many scientists believe is contributing to global climate change, would adhere to its pledge under the Paris deal.

“Not a big fan because other countries don’t adhere to it, and China doesn’t adhere to it, and China’s spewing into the atmosphere,” he said.

The accord to transform the world’s fossil-fuel driven economy was a potent signal to investors.

It seeks to limit a rise in global temperatures to less than 2 degrees Celsius through combined national pledges to cut emissions, and provide funding for developing nations to mitigate the damaging effects of a sea level rise and climate change.

The Obama administration pledged a 26 to 28 percent domestic reduction in greenhouse gases by 2025 compared to 2005, while China promised it would halt increases in carbon emissions by 2030. Both countries have promised to ratify the deal this year.

Many U.S. Republicans have found fault with the deal for overreacting to what they see as an uncertain threat.

Former French foreign minister Laurent Fabius, who helped broker the deal, said this month that the U.S. election was critical to its future. “If a climate change denier was to be elected, it would threaten dramatically global action against climate disruption,” he said.

 

first meter of ice melt, starting on the early side at @PromiceGL NUK_L site west Greenland pic.twitter.com/O8io0GK7YS

— Prof. Jason Box (@climate_ice) May 18, 2016

One more reason to support Dark Snow this year:

Now is the time to support the 2016 Dark Snow Field campaign. More about that here.

Washington Post:

One of the oldest and best-established ideas about global warming is that it will hit the Arctic the hardest. The concept, which goes back to papers published decades ago, is called “Arctic amplification,” and the basic idea is that there’s a key feedback in this system that makes everything worse.

It works like this: Warmer air melts more of the sea ice cover that sits atop the Arctic ocean, especially during summer, which is, of course, ice melt season. That means the ocean is able to absorb more solar radiation than before, when it was covered with ice that reflected this sunlight away. That means there’s more heat retained in the system — and so on, and so on.

Continue reading “Arctic Melting In “Uncharted Territory””

Discover:

On April 11, a dramatic early spike in melting of snow and ice at the surface of Greenland’s ice sheet prompted a Danish climate scientist to say that she and her colleagues were “incredulous.”

Now, there has been a second bout of unusual melting.

You can see both of them in the graph above from the National Snow and Ice Data Center, or NSIDC. It charts the percentage of the Greenland Ice Sheet experiencing surface melting. In both cases, the thaw exceeded 10 percent of the ice sheet’s area.

One more reason to support Dark Snow this year:

Now is the time to support the 2016 Dark Snow Field campaign. More about that here.

When I noticed the second spike, I reached out by email to Ted Scambos, lead scientist for the NSIDC science team, to get his reaction to what has been happening in the Arctic lately. Here was his reply:

The Arctic is going to go through hell this year. Both the sea ice and the Greenland surface melting. Snow cover will also set a record.

Scambos emphasized that he wasn’t basing his prediction on a rigorous analysis of data. Instead:

I’m going on ‘duck test’ here: if it walks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck…

The quacking so far this year has been rather loud all around the the high north, with unusual and persistent warmth, large-scale fracturing of Arctic sea ice, plunging sea ice extent (more about that in a minute), and the two spikes in Greenland surface melting.

The April spike was particularly unusual because of its size, and the fact that it occurred so early in the spring.

Continue reading “Snowball in Hell: Greenland Ice Sheet Record Thaw”

This should stimulate a discussion.  No throwing food please.

This is another piece from my discussion with Dr. Mark Jacobson of Stanford, conducted in San Francisco in December. Here he gives his estimate of the relative value of renewables vs Nuclear power in solving climate change. I’ve intercut with a 2012 interview given by Bill Gates at a Wall Street Journal forum, which is still pretty current.  Gates is an investor in a “4th generation” nuclear technology, which he is sure will be ready some time in coming decades, if all goes well.  In a recent Scientific American piece, Gates confirmed that he is still backing the same tech, although the deadlines have slipped a couple years:

The idea, through a partnership with China or some other country, is: Can you get the pilot plant built, if everything went well, by 2024? And then have six years of operating experience where by 2030 you would say to the world, “Hey, build as many of these as you want. All new nuclear starts should be this and nuclear starts as a percentage of new or replacement energy should be very high.” That’s the possibility, but we’ve got to get the pilot plant built. We’ve got to get it approved. It has to work super well. The time frames can’t slip too dramatically. It’s a serious entrant and, from my potentially biased point of view, in the nuclear fission category I don’t know many other entrants that you look at and say, “Okay, if you go from paper to real, then this is a meaningful contribution to cheap energy, and to global warming as an incredible problem.”

Below, 2 more pieces from Jacobson, an overview of renewable potential, and his take on the impacts of natural gas.

Continue reading “Renewables? Or Nuclear? Jacobson, Gates, on Energy Breakthroughs”

Let me toot my horn a little.  Here’s why you need to support this year’s Dark Snow Project field campaign.  There’s a track record here that’s worth celebrating, and getting behind.

Florida’s Governor has made it against policy for state employees to use the words “climate change”.

You may have read that in the Washington Post, Miami Herald, or New York Times in spring of last year – but if you were a regular viewer of my video series “This is Not Cool”, you would have known about the blackout in the Sunshine State months ahead of the mainstream media, as I covered it in my piece on South Florida Sea Level rise the year before.

That’s not a fluke or a one-off, it’s been a consistent pattern.

For instance, a major discussion in the climate science community has been, not about whether climate change is happening, but rather – the degree to which arctic sea ice loss is already affecting global weather patterns.

In June of 2013, I featured two opposing voices in this debate, Jennifer Francis of Rutgers, and Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, taking
different sides of the issue.

Continue reading “Dark Snow Project 2016 Field Campaign”

All round reasonable defense of science, reason, and fact.

You know, radical stuff.