Alun Hubbard is one of the hardest of hard core glaciologist, and a friend that I’ve spent some time with in Greenland over the years. As the pictures richly illustrate here, he knows ice, up close and personal.
I’m striding along the steep bank of a raging white-water torrent, and even though the canyon is only about the width of a highway, the river’s flow is greater than that of London’s Thames. The deafening roar and rumble of the cascading water is incredible – a humbling reminder of the raw power of nature.
As I round a corner, I am awestruck at a completely surreal sight: A gaping fissure has opened in the riverbed, and it is swallowing the water in a massive whirlpool, sending up huge spumes of spray. This might sound like a computer-generated scene from a blockbuster action movie – but it’s real.
A moulin is forming right in front of me on the Greenland ice sheet. Only this really shouldn’t be happening here – current scientific understanding doesn’t accommodate this reality.
As a glaciologist, I’ve spent 35 years investigating how meltwater affects the flow and stability of glaciers and ice sheets.
This gaping hole that’s opening up at the surface is merely the beginning of the meltwater’s journey through the guts of the ice sheet. As it funnels into moulins, it bores a complex network of tunnels through the ice sheet that extend many hundreds of meters down, all the way to the ice sheet bed.
When it reaches the bed, the meltwater decants into the ice sheet’s subglacial drainage system – much like an urban stormwater network, though one that is constantly evolving and backing up. It carries the meltwater to the ice margins and ultimately ends up in the ocean, with major consequences for the thermodynamics and flow of the overlying ice sheet.
Scenes like this and new research into the ice sheet’s mechanics are challenging traditional thinking about what happens inside and under ice sheets, where observations are extremely challenging yet have stark implications. They suggest that Earth’s remaining ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are far more vulnerable to climate warming than models predict, and that the ice sheets may be destabilizing from inside.
Over the last two decades, as San Antonio and surrounding Bexar County, Texas, grew by more than 600,000 people, some 17% of the city’s blocks experienced a decrease in population.
That delta is largely due to flood risk that climate change exacerbates, according to a new report by the First Street Foundation, a data nonprofit with the mission of communicating climate hazards.
Bexar — sitting in a swath of Texas known as Flash Flood Alley — is part of a national trend of hyper-local migration to avoid flooding, which is hollowing out blocks within cities, the report finds. The research is based on a model, published Monday in the journal Nature Communications, that looks at population changes using granular US Census Bureau data and controls for factors besides flooding, such as nearby job opportunities and school quality.
In all, First Street finds, 3.2 million Americans moved away from high-flood-risk areas between 2000 and 2020. The full extent of the migration has been hidden, however, since most people didn’t move far.
“There appear to be clear winners and losers in regard to the impact of flood risk on neighborhood-level population change,” Jeremy Porter, head of climate implications research at First Street, said in a statement. “The downstream implications of this are massive and impact property values, neighborhood composition and commercial viability, both positively and negatively.”
The analysis also extrapolates these trends 30 years into the future, predicting that vulnerable areas will continue to lose population.
In the US, the frequency of disasters causing at least $1 billion in damages has gone from roughly three a year during the 1980s to an annual average of 17.8 over the period 2018 to 2022, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Global warming has knock-on effects that exacerbate flooding in particular, including sea level rise, more ferocious hurricanes and more frequent and extended downpours.
Below, a Detroit area local news report about recent flooding in Southeast Michigan. No mention of the word “climate”, but neighbors talk about floods becoming more frequent, area disaster manager mentions “significant rainfall that we’re not used to seeing.”
Park Williams is Professor of Geography at UCLA, and is lead author of an influential study of Western US paleoclimate showing a repetitive occurrence of long periods of aridity – termed Megadroughts.
The period we’re in now already qualifies as a medium strength Megadrought, the only variable is how long it continues. This drought is also super charged by more than a 1 degree C rise in global temperatures in the last century.
Longest mega drought pattern in the last 1200 years lasted a century. Just sayin..
On this day, 60 years ago, May 25, 1961, John Kennedy challenged America to put a man on the moon before the end of that decade.
Though the technologies needed to achieve that goal had only been envisioned, not yet built, bold expert engineers thought the goal was within reach, and that the alternative, of ceding Cold War technological supremacy to the Soviet Union, was not acceptable.
Similarly today, President Biden has set goals for climate action that some feel are too optimistic. In our case the technologies needed are fully available already, with more improvements sure to come.
Going thru my interview with Emily Atkin, who edits the great climate newsletter Heated.
I’m working on a piece about the crossover between climate denial and the tsunami of Bullshit that is swamping our democracy.
Above, Atkin mentions congressional hearings, and the endless nattering of fossil fuel tools, which made me think of the clip of Scientist Richard Alley handling Dana Rohrabacher, on ice ages and “earth wobbles”. (which are real, just not responsible for current warming)
As fires raged in California last year, I interviewed Daniel Swain of UCLA on the science. He made note that along with the flames, conspiracy theories also raged.
The stretch of Arctic ice between Greenland and the Canadian Arctic Archipelago is known as ‘the Last Ice Area’, thought by scientists to have the best chance of surviving the climate crisis – but new research suggests it could be more vulnerable to disappearing than previously thought.
It’s the oldest and the thickest stretch of ice in the Arctic region, and up to this point it’s managed to survive even the warmest summers on record. There are even hopes that it will eventually act as the foundation of a spreading Arctic ice region, if we can get the planet to begin cooling down again.
Maybe not, according to a new analysis of satellite data looking specifically at ice arches along Nares Strait, which is 40 kilometres (25 miles) wide and 600 kilometres (373 miles) long.
Ice arches aren’t traditional arches at all, they’re key patches of ice that form seasonally and prevent other pieces of ice from entering a body of water. The Nares Strait and its arches could play a crucial role in whether or not the Last Ice Area survives through the peak of global warming.
“The ice arches that usually develop at the northern and southern ends of Nares Strait play an important role in modulating the export of Arctic Ocean multi-year sea ice,” write the researchers in their published paper.
“We show that the duration of arch formation has decreased over the past 20 years, while the ice area and volume fluxes along Nares Strait have both increased.”
Simply put, the Nares Strait ice arches that effectively hold the Last Ice Area in place are becoming less stable. The risk is that this old ice will not just melt in place, but also break up and drift southwards into warmer regions, speeding up the melting process.
The ice arches look like bridges on their sides, blocking the movement of ice from north to south. The problem is that the arches are breaking up earlier in the year than they have previously, allowing more ice to flow through the Nares Strait.
Every year, according to observations, the ice arches are breaking up a week earlier than before. The ice blockage is becoming thinner and less of a barrier, and that is leading to changes further north – it’s estimated that ice movement in the Last Ice Area is increasing twice as fast as it is in the rest of the Arctic.
like the neo-nazi demonstrators in the capitol last week, who pooped on Capitol floors and smeared it on walls, climate deniers wish to leave a science denial turd behind as they are chased out of the White House.
Like the neo-nazi demonstrators in the capitol last week, who pooped on Capitol floors and smeared it on walls, climate deniers wish to leave a science denial turd behind as they are chased out of the White House.
Above, William Happer, one of the White House’s favored “climate experts”, insists that carbon dioxide has been unfairly discriminated against. ““The demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler,”
UPDATE: NOAA has released a statement disavowing the bogus “climate science” flyers:
Controversial papers questioning the seriousness of climate change led by David Legates, a senior official at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration appointed by President Trump, have been published online without White House approval.
The papers, which were published on nongovernment websites, bear the imprint of the Executive Office of the President and state they were copyrighted by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). But they were disavowed.
“These papers were not created at the direction of The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy nor were they cleared or approved by OSTP leadership,” OSTP spokeswoman Kristina Baum said in an email.
The papers make controversial and disputed claims about climate science, including that human-caused global warming “involves a large measure of faith” and that computer models are “too small and slow” to produce meaningful climate simulations.
Legates did not reply to requests for comment regarding why the papers were published bearing the seal of the Executive Office of the President when they were not approved.
These papers were not created at the direction of The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy nor were they cleared or approved by OSTP leadership. https://t.co/OagzxoU4Hd
Legates, a climate skeptic and climatology professor at the University of Delaware, has been a mysterious figure at NOAA since he started in September. Shortly after joining the agency he was detailed to a position overseeing the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which coordinates federal climate change research, while remaining a NOAA employee.
Optimism is often seen as naive, but I choose to believe that, properly exercised, it is a force multiplier.
Above, Reuters has a clear eyed view of the unprecedented moment we are at in the energy transition. Below, Keith Schneider, the Sage of Benzonia, Michigan, looks forward.
There really is not a way to hit on a word, or even an assembly of words, to adequately encompass the tough, dangerous, and ultimately exceptional year that 2020 has been.
Next year will be better. And the 2020s promise to be a decade of real progess. During this decade technology and ecology will marry more firmly than ever to produce pathbreaking achievements in sectors that really matter— energy, transportation, agriculture, climate, resources, and manufacturing. —
With Trump gone, a new era has opened. The United States is again seriously considering how to construct a true green new deal — the melding of ecological values to investment and industrial practices to build a fairer and more just economy.
The foundation is in place. Black fuels, for instance, are in retreat as investors move capital to less expensive and cleaner alternative energy sources. In 2018, according to an assessment by Tim Buckley, an Australian analyst, 31 significant financial institutions abandoned coal. In 2019 the list was longer, with 46 major investment banks and institutions announcing coal exits. In 2020 so far there have been 68 such actions around the world.
Oil companies evaporated as sound investment options. Oil and natural gas prices are near historic lows. Drilling activity has diminished. A proposal to build a monumental gas storage hub in West Virginia is slipping closer to irrelevancy.
On the other side of the energy sector, carbon-free power is seizing command of the electrical sector. Electric vehicles are poised to lead the market by the end of the decade, if not sooner. Responding to climate disruption is a top tier political issue, and not just in the United States. Energy, water, soil, and community-conserving food production practices are being adopted as central tenets of mainstream agriculture.
American companies’ commitment to ingenuity, science, and manufacturing prowess just delivered two COVID-19 vaccines in under a year. Amazon is remaking how the world operates with the same era-changing influence that steam engines had on sailing schooners. The same is true for Tesla and Google. Look at Linkedin’s news page. It’s a scrolling compendium of trends that convey hope for the world.
