Lethal Heating: 08/25/16

25/08/2016

Human-Induced Climate Change Began Earlier Than Previously Thought

The Guardian - Ian Sample

Signs of warming appear as early as 1830 say researchers, whose analysis will help build accurate baseline of temperature before influence of human activity

The first signs of warming from the rise in greenhouse gases which came hand-in-hand with the Industrial Revolution appear as early as 1830. Photograph: Print Collector/Getty Images

Continents and oceans in the northern hemisphere began to warm with industrial-era fossil fuel emissions nearly 200 years ago, pushing back the origins of human-induced climate change to the mid-19th century.
The first signs of warming from the rise in greenhouse gases which came hand-in-hand with the Industrial Revolution appear as early as 1830 in the tropical oceans and the Arctic, meaning that climate change witnessed today began about 180 years ago.
Researchers in Australia found evidence for the early onset of warming after trawling through 500 years of data on tree rings, corals and ice cores that together form a natural archive of Earth's historical temperatures.

Temperature trends for the continents and tropical oceans over the last 500 years. Credit: Abram et al.

Much of what is known about Earth's climate history is based on instruments that have monitored temperatures from the 1880s onwards. But while these capture the changing conditions seen in the 20th century, they miss the start of the warming trend.
"A lot is known about the climate record for the time when we have instrumental records," said Nerilie Abram, a climate scientist at the Australian National University. "We wanted to look at whether these records give us the full picture."
Pooling the data, the scientists found that temperatures in the tropical oceans and in the air above northern hemisphere land-masses began to rise above natural variations in the 1830s, just as greenhouse gas emissions edged upwards.
The scientists first thought that they were seeing the climate rebound after a period of natural cooling brought on by particles thrown high into the atmosphere from volcanic eruptions. But climate simulations showed that the warming they observed could be explained purely by the small rise in greenhouse gas emissions.
"The changes in greenhouse gases in the 19th century were small compared with the fairly rapid changes we see now, so seeing the climate respond this way was a surprise," said Abrams.

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The southern hemisphere, including Australasia and South America, appeared to start heating up 50 years later, near the turn of the century, while no sign of warming on the continental scale was noticed in Antarctica. The lack of appreciable warming in Antarctica may be down to ocean currents carrying warm waters to the north and away from the frigid continent.
The results are important to build up an accurate baseline of the Earth's temperature before human activity began to wield an influence on the climate. Details of the study, which involved 25 scientists across Australia, the US, Europe and Asia, are published in the journal Nature.
Industrialisation led to only minor rises in greenhouse gases in the 1800s, but what struck the scientists was how swiftly the climate changed as a result. "There is a potential that this could have a flip side," Abram said. "If we can do anything to slow down greenhouse gas emissions, or even start to draw them back, there may be at least some areas of the climate system where we get a rapid payback."
Ed Hawkins, a meteorologist at Reading University, said the results show how tree rings, corals and other natural material can be used to understand the regional and global changes that unfolded during and since the pre-industrial period. "This is further evidence that the climate has already changed significantly since the pre-industrial period," he said.

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What Will It Take For Us To Pay Attention To Climate Change?

ABC Science Show - Bob Beale

Australia's coastline has seen massive changes in the past six months, 2015 was recorded as the hottest year on record, and 2016 is shaping up to be even hotter. Former Sydney Morning Herald journalist Bob Beale laments that nobody seems to be taking any notice.

Australians are experiencing an influx of destructive storms and cyclones. (Torsten Blackwood/Getty Images)

My Facebook page prompts me to say what is on my mind. Actually I'm feeling quite wretched. I have a very bad dose of solastalgia, a term coined by my friend Glenn Albrecht, an environmental philosopher.
Solastalgia is feeling homesick while you are still at home, a melancholy brought on by the loss or degradation of a treasured environment. My solastalgia is for my country, indeed for my whole planet. I'm asking myself, what exactly does Earth need to do to get our attention?

To be bluntly colloquial, it's very bloody real, it's right bloody here, right bloody now. It's about as serious a challenge as we can face. We really urgently need to be all on the same page about this.

No, really, what the heckedy-heck does it take to make us truly sit up and notice the massive changes going on in the natural world around us? It's a travesty that so many people are fixated by staring at their so-called smart phones in a search for imaginary Pokémon creatures, while the real plants and animals of the world are turning up their toes in their billions.
Look what has been happening lately around Australia's coastline alone. If our home is girt by sea, as our national anthem says, then all the signs are that we are effectively burning the floorboards. Disaster after disaster is happening.
Think I'm being alarmist? Well, think about this—off Queensland, more than nine-tenths of the Great Barrier Reef has just been bleached. Perhaps a quarter of it has died and likely won't come back.
Look up north in the Gulf—the worst mass die-off of mangroves ever seen, 10,000 hectares of it along great lengths of the coast. Look off Western Australia—960 square kilometres of kelp forest has just disappeared. More than a third of it is now extinct. And all of this has become evident in just the past six months alone. It's as if our oceans have just suffered a massive stroke.
And don't get me started about the terrible decline in bird populations around our shorelines, or about the rapid southward shift of tropical and subtropical fish, seaweeds and urchins. We are finding Nemo in Tasmanian waters!
And don't mention the millions of tonnes of man-made polymer waste materials, PET bottles, caps, bags, disposable plates, wrappers, you name it, that enter our oceans every year, turning them into one great plastic soup. The sand on every single Australian beach is now made up in part of countless grains of plastic. I could go on—but what's the point?
I know I'm far from alone in being aghast about all this. But if the list I have just reeled off hasn't got Australians off their butt demanding action and marching in the streets, I don't know what will.
So friends, I ask again, what will it take?
Climate records are falling with menacing regularity. In recent years we've broken record after record for heat, extreme rain and other disruptive weather events. Last spring we broke heat records. Last summer we had searing heat waves, and extreme temperatures smashed records across south-eastern Australian, followed by our warmest autumn on record.
Sea surface temperatures have been going off the charts as well. The world in general has been cooking too, with June being the hottest month ever recorded globally. 2015 was the warmest year on record, beating the previous mark set in 2014, and now 2016 is likely to break the record again.
Climate change is not some nebulous political game that might affect our grandchildren. To be bluntly colloquial, it's very bloody real, it's right bloody here, right bloody now. It's about as serious a challenge as we can face. We really urgently need to be all on the same page about this. Yet climate change was not even mentioned in the Turnbull government's first budget in May. Not a word, not a sausage. Such assiduous avoidance. Incredible, isn't it?
Worse still, that same budget gouged $1.3 billion in funds away from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency. You have to ask, what on earth were they thinking? And climate change barely caused a flicker of debate in our recent federal election as well.
Instead we were fobbed off yet again by the major parties, and now we have Pauline Hanson elected once again on a platform of outright denial of climate science, to nourish fresh cankers of complacency and social division in our Parliament.
The real border security issue is the appalling damage we ourselves are doing to our coasts and oceans. The real negative gearing is the one we've been imposing on our planet. And the real superannuation problem is the squandering of natural resources, consumption for consumption's sake, at the expense of our kids and grandchildren.
Our civic leaders, our intellectuals, our politicians, and our mass media are playing Pokémon Go with us. When we try to reflect on, to consider and absorb the significance and meaning of these disasters, they blur our field of view by invoking phantoms to distract us. Indeed, they are worse than negligent, they are complicit. They know what needs to be done, but it's so much easier to deflect, distract, deny and delay.
Here's a word I just made up to describe our politicians in action on climate change—stagnertia.
A pox on all of them. A pox on them for leaving unattended and untreated the raging fever afflicting our planet.
One more time I ask, what will it take?

Bob Beale says the Earth is sending strong messages that things are seriously out of balance.

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Climate Change Is Thawing Deadly Diseases. Maybe Now We'll Address It?

The Guardian - Mona Sarfaty*

An anthrax outbreak in Russia came from a 75-year-old caribou carcass thawing out. This is only the beginning of this sort of thing happening

'In addition to releasing ancient microbes, melting layers of permafrost also release methane, a greenhouse gas 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide, that in turn causes further warming.' Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

Earlier this month, an outbreak of anthrax in northern Russia caused the death of a 12-year-old boy and his grandmother and put 90 people in the hospital. These deadly spores – which had not been seen in the Arctic since 1941 – also spread to 2,300 caribou. Russian troops trained in biological warfare were dispatched to the Yamalo-Nenets region to evacuate hundreds of the indigenous, nomadic people and quarantine the disease.
Americans are likely to associate anthrax with the mysterious white powder that was mailed to news media and US Senate offices in the weeks following 11 September 2001. The bacteria – usually sequestered in biological weapons labs – killed five people and infected 17 others in the most devastating bioterrorism attack in US history.
But in Russia, the spread of illness was not the result of bioterrorism; it was a result of global warming. Record-high temperatures melted Arctic permafrost and released deadly anthrax spores from a thawing carcass of a caribou that had been infected 75 years ago and had stayed frozen in limbo until now. This all suggests that it may not be easy to predict which populations will be most vulnerable to the health impacts of climate change.
In 2013, the National Academy of Sciences hosted a forum on the influence of global environmental change on infectious diseases. In his keynote speech, Dr Jonathan Patz stood in front of a large slide of a mosquito and warned: "Global warming's greatest threat may also be the smallest." The forum focused on many causes of disease, from fungi, bacteria, viruses and mold spores, to vectors like bats and mosquitoes. Climate change can exacerbate the spread of infectious disease by changing the behavior, lifespans and regions of diseases and their carriers.
This can sometimes be hard to prove directly. It can be challenging, for example, to isolate the avenues by which climate change drives emerging infections in warm climates where travel, trade, land use and dense urban living can all lead to the spread of disease. At other times, the signal is bright. Looking way up north in the Arctic – where there are far fewer people, less travel and trade, and fewer infectious diseases – the signal that climate change is a source of disease outbreaks is clear.
It is usually so cold in the tundra that the ground is perennially frozen in deep layers that can date back 3m years. But the usual circumstances no longer apply at the top of the world. The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the globe. In fact, the area of the anthrax outbreak was 18F (10C) hotter than average, with temperatures reaching 95F (35C). In addition to releasing ancient microbes, melting layers of permafrost also release methane, a greenhouse gas 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide, that in turn causes further warming.
It is not just animal carcasses that are thawing. Indigenous groups living in the tundra do not bury their dead deep underground, opting instead for wooden coffins arranged in above-ground cemeteries. This raises the potential for infections to spread from this source as well.
Could some of the severe infectious diseases that have threatened the planet in the past be reactivated as our northernmost regions thaw? It's not just climate scientists that are concerned about the health threats of a warming world. Public health experts and physicians are also speaking out. The Lancet Commission released a report in 2015 asserting that climate change could reverse the last 50 years of public health advances.
As risk is added to risk, the signals of our changing climate underscore the urgent need to put climate change solutions in place. Even more than we know, our health may depend on it.

*Mona Sarfaty is the director of Program for Climate and Health, Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason

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