Month: March 2022

Dark Snow: Wildfire Smoke plays Big Role in Melting Arctic Sea Ice

Jason Box’s 2012 epiphany that lead to forming the Dark Snow Project now further born out in new research.

BBC:

The dense plumes of wildfire smoke seen in recent years are contributing to the warming of the Arctic, say scientists. 

Their study says that particles of “brown carbon” in the smoke are drifting north and attracting heat to the polar region. 

The authors believe the growing number of wildfires helps explain why the Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the planet. 

They’re concerned that this effect will likely increase.

Over the past decade, smoke from raging wildfires in Australia, Portugal, Siberia and the US have changed the colour of the skies. The smoke has impacted human health, and the amount of carbon released by the burning has helped push emissions to record levels.

But now scientists say that all this burning has contributed to another serious issue – the loss of sea ice in the Arctic.

Researchers have long been familiar with “black carbon“, the sooty particles that are emitted from diesel engines, coal burning, cooking stoves and other sources. 

These aerosols, which absorb sunlight and turn it into heat, are known to be the second largest contributor to global warming.

The impact of these particles on the Arctic and on clouds has been well documented.

However, the same can’t be said for brown carbon – which principally comes from the burning of trees and vegetation but is also created, to a lesser degree, from fossil fuels. The warming effect of this less dense substance has been either ignored or estimated with huge uncertainty in climate models. 

To develop a better understanding of the impacts, researchers travelled around the Arctic ocean on the Chinese icebreaker, Xue Long, in 2017.

While some previous estimates had shown brown carbon was responsible for just 3% of the warming effect compared to black carbon, the scientists found that it is doing far more damage in the region. 

“To our surprise, observational analyses and numerical simulations show that the warming effect of brown carbon aerosols over the Arctic is up to about 30% of that of black carbon,” says senior author Pingqing Fu, an atmospheric chemist at Tianjin University in China.

The study found that wildfires were the main source of this brown material – contributing twice as much to the warming effect of brown carbon in the Arctic than was coming from fossil fuels.

The authors believe that while black soot has played the major role, brown carbon had a hand in the exceptional warming being felt in the Arctic region in recent decades.

Ukraine War Supercharges Global Move to Clean Energy

Russia’s use of gas as a weapon against democracy has galvanized the move toward clean energy, and drawn support from a whole new segment of the public, those more concerned about security than climate. (although we know they go together..)

Guardian:

A massive expansion of wind farms across the UK is now needed for national security reasons, the business secretary has declared, as, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the government considers sweeping changes to planning laws to improve Britain’s energy independence.

Boris Johnson is planning to unveil a radical new “energy strategy” within a fortnight to ensure the UK can meet its domestic needs from a mix of renewables and nuclear. The war in Ukraine has brought further huge rises in global fossil fuel prices and exposed countries’ dependence on overseas supplies.

Remarkably, the need for more on- and offshore windfarms – traditionally a highly controversial subject in the Conservative party – is now being talked about within government as a matter of security, rather than a way of fighting climate change.

Renewables such as wind and solar power are expected to be part of the new government strategy to free Britain from dependence on imported oil and gas and spare households and businesses from the effects of wild fluctuations on global energy markets.

Kwasi Kwarteng, the business, energy and industrial strategy secretary, said last week on Twitter: “This is no longer about tackling climate change or reaching net-zero targets. Ensuring the UK’s clean energy independence is a matter of national security. Putin can set the price of gas, but he can’t directly control the price of renewables and nuclear we generate in the UK.”

Official figures show that meeting net-zero targets would lead to a drop in gas use of 65% by 2035 in the UK, and almost 100% by 2050.

France 24:

The Mediterranean’s first offshore wind farm is rising from the shallows off Italy, its turbines a symbol of hope for a Europe suffering an energy crisis exacerbated by war. 

The park will stretch out from the port in Taranto, a city in the south blighted by a noxious steel plant and unemployment, but which now finds itself centre stage in the country’s race to scale up green power.

“This is a big chance to change hearts and minds on renewables,” said Fabio Matacchiera, an activist in Taranto, where child tumours are well above the average but poor locals cling to jobs in dirty energy.

The Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine in February prompted an outraged European Union to pledge to sharply reduce its dependency on Russian gas, and expand clean energy faster to compensate.

Italy is one of Europe’s biggest guzzlers of gas, which currently represents 42 percent of its energy consumption. It imports 95 percent of the gas it uses, 45 percent of which comes from Russia.

An “accelerated investment in renewables… remains the only key strategy in the long term,” Prime Minister Mario Draghi told parliament last week, with Rome planning to stop using Russian gas by 2025.

As the Ukraine conflict rages, Italy’s cabinet has approved six new wind farms to be built on land, from Sardinia to Basilicata, and has committed to unlocking “several tens of gigawatts of offshore wind power”.

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The Tyranny of Oil: Antonia Juhasz on Oil’s Reach

Exxon Chair/Trump’s first Secretary of State Rex Tillerson with friend.

Antonia Juhasz on Twitter:

Alright folks, here’s a little lecture from my book, The Tyranny of Oil, about how #gasoline prices are set in the U.S., and yes, it’s largely under the control of the largest oil companies — Exxon, Chevron, BP, Shell, etc, — even though it’s not legally supposed to be. a 🧵 

1. The major oil companies in the U.S. are vertically integrated, controlling production, refining, & sales.

2) They set the price of #gasoline at stations they own. But most stations are “independently owned” & branded- ie selling the major brands “Exxon” “Shell” “Chevron” etc. 

3) It is illegal for oil companies to set prices at gas stations they do not own, but they’ve has found several ways to get around the law—by controlling the prices charged at its branded stations through the wholesale price for gas, “suggested” retail prices, & zone pricing.

4) The wholesale price is the price at which the gas station purchases its gasoline from the oil company. Big Oil sets the wholesale price of all gasoline sold to its branded dealers. 

5) Setting the wholesale price allows Big Oil to establish a vise around the price branded gas stations can charge and a lock on the profits from higher retail prices. 

6) The price we pay at the pump is the wholesale price (going to the oil company) + a tiny margin, usually just 3 -10 cents per gallon. These pennies per gallon are the ONLY profit the gas station owner receives. Their money is mostly off of the convenience store, not the gas. 

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Arctic Ice Loss Staggering in 2021

Jason Box has an eye-popping update (above) to a 2018 paper on Arctic ice contributions to sea level.
First paper linked below.

Jason Box et al – Global sea-level contribution from Arctic land ice: 1971–2017:

In all regions, the cumulative sea-level rise curves exhibit an acceleration, starting especially after 1988. Greenland is the source of 46% of the Arctic sea-level rise contribution (10.6 ± 7.3 mm), followed by Alaska (5.7 ± 2.2 mm), Arctic Canada (3.2 ± 0.7 mm) and the Russian High Arctic (1.5 ± 0.4 mm).

“A World Being Remade”: Scientists React to Stunning Antarctic Heat Wave

Yesterday’s news about a 70 to 90 degree heat anomaly in Antarctica drove some chatter on Science twitter.

Andrew Dessler in the San Antonio Express-News:

NASA and NOAA recently announced 2019 was the second-hottest year on record, trailing only 2016.

It’s been 43 years since global temperatures weren’t above average. Fires are scorching broad swaths of Australia, as they have around the world, from California to Siberia. The seas are rising, taking over real estate in South Florida on sunny days and devastating coastal communities when hurricanes strike.

This is not just destruction. It is transformation.

We are seeing the world remade before our eyes.

During the depth of the last ice age 20,000 years ago, the world was a different place. Ice sheets, thousands of feet thick, covered much of North America. Sea levels were 300 feet lower, changing the contours of the continents. Woolly mammoths roamed North America. The environment looked different, and ecosystems were made up of plants and animals that are quite different from today’s critters.

What’s amazing is that the planet was only 10 degrees Fahrenheit colder at that time.

Let me repeat that: If you cool the Earth by 10 degrees Fahrenheit, you end up with a completely different planet.

If we don’t take action to head off climate change, we could experience 10 degrees Fahrenheit of warming in the next century or two, comparable to the warming since the last ice age. If it occurs, such warming would remake the face of Earth. That future Earth would be as unrecognizable to those of us living today as the last ice age.

Humans are really good at “linear thinking,” so most people imagine that impacts of climate change will be small changes occurring over many years, summing eventually to large changes. But that’s not the way it will happen. The transformation to come will be decidedly nonlinear, meaning it will not occur as small impacts over many years but rather a series of infrequent, huge events of enormous destructive power.

Continue reading ““A World Being Remade”: Scientists React to Stunning Antarctic Heat Wave”

Antarctica 90 Degrees Above Normal. Nothing to See Here

Washington Post:

The coldest location on the planet has experienced an episode of warm weather this week unlike any ever observed, with temperatures over the eastern Antarctic ice sheet soaring 50 to 90 degrees above normal. The warmth has smashed records and shocked scientists.

“This event is completely unprecedented and upended our expectations about the Antarctic climate system,” said Jonathan Wille, a researcher studying polar meteorology at Université Grenoble Alpes in France, in an email.

“Antarctic climatology has been rewritten,” tweeted Stefano Di Battista, a researcher who has published studies on Antarctic temperatures. He added that such temperature anomalies would have been considered “impossible” and “unthinkable” before they actually occurred.

Parts of eastern Antarctica have seen temperatures hover 70 degrees (40 Celsius) above normal for three days and counting, Wille said. Helikened the event to the June 2021 heat wave in the Pacific Northwest, which scientists concluded would have been “virtually impossible” without human-caused climate change.

What is considered “warm” over the frozen, barren confines of eastern Antarctica is, of course, relative. Instead of temperatures being minus-50 (minus-45 Celsius) or minus-60 (minus-51 Celsius), they’ve been closer to 0 (minus-18 Celsius) or 10 (minus-12 Celsius) degrees — but that’s a massive heat wave by Antarctic standards.

The average high temperature in Vostok — at the center of the eastern ice sheet — is around minus-63 (minus-53 Celsius) in March. But on Friday, the temperature leaped to 0 degrees (minus-17.7 Celsius), the warmest it’s been there during March since record keeping began 65 years ago. It broke the previous monthly record by a staggering 27 degrees (15 Celsius).

“In about 65 record years in Vostok, between March and October, values ​​above -30°C were never observed,” wrote Di Battista in an email. 

Vostok, a Russian meteorological observatory, is about 808 miles southeast of the South Pole and sits 11,444 feet above sea level. It’s famous for holding the lowest temperature ever observed on Earth: minus-128.6 degrees (minus-89.2 Celsius), set on July 21, 1983.

Temperatures running at least 50 degrees (32 Celsius) above normal have expanded over vast portions of eastern Antarctica from the Adélie Coast through much of the eastern ice sheet’s interior. Some computer model simulations and observations suggest temperatures may have even climbed up to 90 degrees (50 Celsius) above normal in a few areas.

Continue reading “Antarctica 90 Degrees Above Normal. Nothing to See Here”