Lethal Heating: March 2018

31/03/2018

More Than 75 Percent Of Earth’s Land Areas Are ‘Broken,’ Major Report Finds

Motherboard - Stephen Leahy

Once-productive lands have become deserts, are polluted, or deforested, putting 3.2 billion people at risk.

In Thailand, global warming and lack of rainfall causes cultivated land to dry up and crack. Image: Petr Baumann/Shutterstock

Like a broken cell phone that can only text or take pictures, but not make a single call, more than 75 percent of the Earth’s land areas have lost some or most of their functions, undermining the well-being of the 3.2 billion people that rely on them to produce food crops, provide clean water, control flooding and more.
These once-productive lands have either become deserts, are polluted, or have been deforested and converted for unsustainable agricultural production. This is a major contributor to increased conflict and mass human migration, and left unchecked, could force as many as 700 million to migrate by 2050, according to the world’s first comprehensive evidence-based assessment of land degradation, released today in Medellín, Colombia.

Deforestation in Madagascar. Image: Dudarev Mikhail/Shutterstock

Land degradation—including deforestation, soil erosion, and salinity and pollution of fresh water systems—is also driving species to extinction and aggravating the effects of climate change, the report concludes. It was written by more than 100 leading experts from 45 countries for the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). IPBES is the ‘IPCC for biodiversity,’ a scientific assessment of the status of non-human life that makes up the Earth’s life support system. A major companion report was released Friday documenting the rapid and dangerous decline in biodiversity. It called for fundamental changes in how we live, run our societies, and the economy.
“This is an extremely urgent issue that we need to address yesterday,” said Robert Scholes, a South African ecologist and co-chair of the assessment. “Land degradation is having the single biggest impact on the well-being of humanity,” Scholes said in an interview in Medellín.
Human activities, mainly those involving agriculture and urbanization, have destroyed or degraded topsoil, forests, and other natural vegetation and water resources nearly everywhere, the report found. Wetlands have been hit hardest, with 87 percent lost globally in the last 300 years. Wetlands continue to be destroyed in southeast Asia and the Congo region, mainly to plant oil palm trees.
Less than 25 percent of the Earth’s land surface has escaped the substantial impacts of human activity—and by 2050, this will have fallen to less than 10 percent. Most of these future land losses will be in Central and South America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia. The only places left relatively unaffected will be polar regions and tundra, high mountains, and deserts, the report projects.
Ending land degradation is “an urgent priority to protect the biodiversity and ecosystem services vital to all life on Earth and to ensure human well-being,” said Luca Montanarella, a soil scientist from Italy and co-chair of the assessment.
“We’ve know about this for over 20 years, but it is only getting worse,” Montanarella said in an interview in Medellín. There is little public awareness and it is not considered an urgent issue by most governments. The only way to stop the decline is at the local level, and through the choices each of us make, he said.

River bank erosion in Bangladesh. Image: Sangib Kumar Barman/Shutterstock

Those choices include choosing to eat less meat and buying food from local growers who use the most sustainable farming practices. Up to 40 percent of food is wasted globally at various points, from farms to overstuffed refrigerators, said Robert Watson, IPBES Chair. Countries also need to end their production subsidies in agriculture, fisheries, energy, and other sectors, Watson told Motherboard.
Rich countries need to take responsibility for the impacts that their consumption of imported products may have. The country landscape of the United Kingdom is a tourist attraction because the country imports 35 to 40 percent of its food from other countries, said Watson. “People don’t see the impacts of their consumption.”
Ending land degradation and restoring damaged lands would provide more than one third of the most cost-effective greenhouse gas mitigation activities required by 2030 to keep global warming to below 2°C. And doing this would cost at least three times less than doing nothing and create much better livelihoods and jobs for local people, said Watson.
“Implementing the right actions to combat land degradation can transform the lives of millions of people across the planet, but this will become more difficult and more costly the longer we take to act,” he said.

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Majority Of Australians Support Phasing Out Coal Power By 2030, Survey Finds

The Guardian - Katharine Murphy

50% of Coalition voters and 67% of Labor voters want to phase out coal, and majority also support striving to cut greenhouse gas emissions

Anti-coal mining protesters join thousands at a march in Sydney on 24 March. Photograph: Rushton/EPA

A majority of Australians would support phasing out coal power by 2030, including half the people in a sample identifying as Coalition voters, according to a survey by a progressive thinktank.
The research funded by the Australia Institute says 60% of a sample of 1,417 Australians surveyed by online market research firm Research Now supported Australia joining the Powering Past Coal Alliance to phase out coal power by 2030.
The Powering Past Coal Alliance – spearheaded by the UK and Canada – was unveiled at the COP23 climate talks in Bonn. The agreement is not legally binding, and the membership does not include Australia or other major coal exporters and users.
The survey suggests there is a core level of support across Australia’s partisan divide for signing on, with 50% of Coalition voters supportive as well as 67% of ALP voters. The significant dissenters were One Nation voters, with only 36% supportive.
A majority of Australians also supported increasing ambition on cutting greenhouse gas emissions, with 58% support, including 47% of Coalition voters in the sample.
“The strong majority support for phasing out coal power shows how far the community is ahead of the government on climate change,” said the Australia Institute’s deputy director, Ebony Bennett.
She said the Turnbull government’s approach on climate and energy policy meant Australia was at risk of missing out on jobs and investment associated with a global boom in renewable energy, and was out of step with public sentiment.
The research follows a declaration on Wednesday at the National Press Club by the resources minister Matt Canavan that he was not interested in contemplating a discussion about a just transition for workers displaced by any phase out of coal consistent with Australia’s international climate obligations.
Canavan said workers suffered when industries shut down or were phased out so euphemisms like “just transitions” were best avoided. “I don’t like the term transition, let’s be frank, if you want to shutdown the coal industry, say it – that’s what will happen.”
The resources minister said expanding the coal industry was “not inconsistent with the obligations we’ve got to reduce carbon emissions”.
He said countries were increasing investment in high-efficiency coal plants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions consistent with the Paris accord. Canavan did not mention that some countries, such as Japan, are increasing investment in high-efficiency coal because of a phase-out of nuclear power.
Canavan also declared in response to a question about balancing his portfolio responsibilities to boost the resources sector with his responsibilities to the Queenslanders who elected him that he had been elected to parliament “on a platform that is unashamedly pro-coal”.
While Canavan was elected because he was given a winnable position on the LNP’s Queensland Senate ticket, the resources minister said: “I got elected on the basis I will support the resources sector.”

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The Sahara Is Growing, Thanks In Part To Climate Change

Washington Post - Darryl Fears

Camels walk on the sand during the “Gallops of Morocco” equestrian race in March in the southern Moroccan Sahara desert. (Fadel Senna/AFP/Getty Images)

Earth’s largest hot desert, the Sahara, is getting bigger, a new study finds. It is advancing south into more tropical terrain in Sudan and Chad, turning green vegetation dry and soil once used for farming into barren ground in areas that can least afford to lose it.
Yet it is not just the spread of the Sahara that is frightening, the researchers say. It’s the timing: It is happening during the African summer, when there is usually more rain. But the precipitation has dried up, allowing the boundaries of the desert to expand.
“If you have a hurricane come suddenly, it gets all the attention from the government and communities galvanize,” said Sumant Nigam, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic science at the University of Maryland and the senior author of the study. “The desert advance over a long period might capture many countries unawares. It’s not announced like a hurricane. It’s sort of creeping up on you.”
The study was published Thursday in the Journal of Climate. The authors said that although their research focused only on the Sahara, it suggests that climate changes also could be causing other hot deserts to expand — with potentially harsh economic and human consequences.
Deserts form in subtropical regions because of a global weather circulation called the Hadley cell. Warm air rises in the tropics near the equator, producing rain and thunderstorms. When the air hits the top of the atmosphere, it spreads north and south toward the poles. It does not sink back down until it is over the subtropics, but as it does, the air warms and dries out, creating deserts and other areas that are nearly devoid of rain.
“Climate change is likely to widen the Hadley circulation, causing northward advance of the subtropical deserts,” Nigam said in a statement that announced the study.
At the same time, he said, the Sahara’s southward creep suggests that additional mechanisms are at work. One is probably the natural climate cycle called the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, or AMO, in which temperatures over a large swath of the northern Atlantic Ocean fluctuate between warm and cold phases for 50 years to 70 years. The warm cycles deliver precipitation to subtropical areas, and the cold cycles keep it away. Human-caused climate change can increase the intensity and length of the drier cycle.
Nigam and the study’s lead researcher, Natalie Thomas, a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland, used data from the Global Precipitation Climatology Center to arrive at their finding. They studied grids and patterns from 1920 to 2013, mixing in satellite data compiled “over the last three decades,” Nigam said.
They determined that the AMO was in a positive phase that delivered more rain to areas near the Sahara from the 1930s to the early 1960s. It then switched to a negative cycle that lasted 40 years. A 1980s drought — “the most intense … of the 20th century” — was attributed to the latter phase and linked to “higher levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”

Railway tracks are covered by sand as a result of desert encroachment in 2013 at Ogrein Railway Station in Sudan. (Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah/Reuters)

Over the second phase, the Sahara crawled south mostly, encroaching on a more tropical area known as the Sahel. Its effect could be seen on a water basin that drains into Lake Chad. “The water level has been falling precipitously,” Nigam said. “It’s very depleted. We can’t attribute it all to rainfall. There may be human draws from the lake. But it’s telling, a visible element, and it clearly lies in the area where the Sahara is encroaching southward.”
Africa is the continent least responsible for human-caused climate change, but it’s the most vulnerable to its effect because of unique features. It is, for example, a land mass almost evenly divided between the Southern and Northern hemispheres, creating a wide variety of climate zones.
Thomas said she started the research as a way to characterize century-long trends but focused on Africa’s Northern Hemisphere when she noticed “really strong trends over the proximity of the Sahara.”
As the researchers went about their work, downloading satellite data and information from the global climatology center, the evidence became more concerning. “The finding was impressive because it was happening in the summer season, the growing season where Africa receives most of its rainfall, a really important season for agriculture,” Nigam said.
Yet that is when the greatest southward advance of the Sahara occurred, he said. A season of rain was being replaced by the expansion of a desert, without the affected governments, Chad and Sudan mostly, noticing.
The future implications for countries already affected by lack of rain and drought could be dire, Nigam said. “Water resource planning, water use and long-term planning is important.”

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Falling Renewable Costs 'Chilling' For Fossil Fuels

Fairfax - Cole Latimer

The rapidly falling cost of renewable energy and batteries is "chilling" for the future of the fossil fuels sector, raising doubts about the viability of new coal power stations.
A Bloomberg New Energy Finance report has found the price of renewables has fallen by almost a fifth over the last year, with wind and solar generators becoming cheaper than both coal and gas-fired power stations.
Elena Giannakopoulou, head of energy economics at BNEF, said the rapidly falling cost of renewable generation and battery power is changing the game for the electricity sector.
"The conclusions are chilling for the fossil fuel sector," she said.

The combination of batteries and wind farms is providing more power flexibility. Photo: David Mariuz

The cost of electricity supplied by lithium-ion batteries, like the Tesla installation in South Australia, has fallen nearly 80 per cent, from $US1000 ($1308) a kilowatt hour in 2010 to only $US209 a kilowatt hour in 2017.
Wind and solar are proving cheaper because their cost of electricity has fallen significantly, while that for coal, gas, nuclear and large hydro projects has only slightly decreased.
"We are seeing record-low prices being set for wind and solar, and then those records being broken again and again on a regular basis. This is having a powerful effect – it is changing perceptions," BNEF head of Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Seb Henbest, said
BNEF said Australia had one of the world's lowest levelised cost of electricity for onshore wind and solar.

Solar power will likely be cheaper than coal by 2020.

The Australian National University forecast future prices of new renewable energy generators would fall to $50 a megawatt hour in the 2020s.
The ASX forward prices for NSW between the 2020 March quarter and 2021 December quarter run to an average of $75.73 a megawatt hour for coal-fired power.
Globally, the levelised cost of electricity for wind farms was $US55 per megawatt hour for the first half of 2018, down 18 per cent from the same time last year, while solar power has also fallen 18 per cent to $US70 per megawatt hour. Only offshore wind generation failed to fall significantly, dipping 5 per cent in costs year on year
EY believes Australian renewable energy will cost the same or be cheaper than fossil fuels as soon as 2020.
This parity is forecast to happen as the Renewable Energy Target - a government scheme designed to support building renewable generation like wind and solar - comes to an end.
However, Ms Giannakopoulou said despite the rapidly falling costs of renewables it does not spell the end for fossil fuels.
"Some existing coal and gas power stations, with sunk capital costs, will continue to have a role for many years, doing a combination of bulk generation and balancing, as wind and solar penetration increase," she said.
"But the economic case for building new coal and gas capacity is crumbling, as batteries start to encroach on the flexibility and peaking revenues enjoyed by fossil fuel plants."
Australia has been putting wind and solar through its paces to see if it can provide both more stable, instantly available energy to the grid, overcoming the issues of how to generate electricity when the wind isn't blowing and the sun doesn't shine.
The government recently announced new trials to improve the accuracy of the renewable systems’ self-forecasting ability, which allows them to predict the weather in their immediate area and know how much electricity they can provide into the grid, ensuring there is no sudden shortfall when the weather changes.
There are also trials to use wind farm-generated electricity to provide power that smooths out demand and supply to make sure it is balanced.
Neoen Australia’s South Australian Hornsdale 2 wind farm also carried out trials providing intermittent energy into electricity markets under a wide range of operating conditions, saving the market about $3.1 million due to the lower cost of energy.

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30/03/2018

Australia's Emissions Rise Again In 2017, Putting Paris Targets In Doubt

The Guardian - Michael Slezak

Exclusive: Excluding unreliable land-use data, 2017 greenhouse emissions were again highest on record

Rising greenhouse gas pollution comes despite decline in electricity sector emissions. Photograph: Getty Images/Universal Images Group

Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2017 were again the highest on record when unreliable data from sectors including land clearing and forestry are excluded, according to consultants NDEVR Environmental.
Even including land clearing, overall emissions show a continued rising trend, which began in about 2011, putting Australia’s commitment under the Paris agreement further out of reach.
The rising greenhouse gas pollution comes despite continued decline in emissions from the electricity sector, following increased renewable energy generation and the closure of Australia’s dirtiest coal power station, Hazelwood.
NDEVR replicates the federal government’s National Greenhouse Gas Inventory (NGGI) quarterly reports, but releases them months ahead of the official data. Previous NDEVR reports’ figures have been within 1% of the official figures when they are eventually released.
The latest NDEVR figures include the last three months of 2017, allowing a comparison of calendar-year figures since records began in 2002, revealing 2017 had the highest emissions on record, when those from land-use change are excluded.

Even including the unreliable land-use figures, overall emissions continued their overall upward trend, taking Australia further from the commitments it made in Paris to help keep global warming under 2C. It is even making its current target (a 26-28% cut below 2005 levels by 2030), which experts agree is not yet strong enough to comply with the Paris agreement, seem increasingly out of reach.
In 2017, Australia’s total emissions from all sectors excluding land-use change came to 556.11m tonnes of CO2-equivalent greenhouse gases, according to NDEVR’s projections. That surpassed the last record, set in just 2016, by 7.21m tonnes.
Overall emissions including land-use change – which involves activities such as land clearing and forestry – were the highest since 2011, indicating a clear upward trend since that time, reversing years of declining emissions starting in 2007.
Emissions from the electricity sector in the last three months of 2017 were the lowest they’ve been in the data set, going back to 2001. And in the full year, they were the second lowest, pipped only by 2013.

But that reduction was overwhelmed by increases in other sectors. Emissions from transport were at a record high in the last three months of 2017, continuing a steady rise since the records began in 2001. Fugitive emissions, which include emissions from the production, processing, transport, storage, transmission and distribution of fossil fuels, were also projected to be the highest on record.
Stationary energy, which includes energy produced for industrial processes such as the growing LNG industry, was also projected to be at the equal highest on record, matching the previous quarter from July to September 2017.

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Biggest Threat To Humanity? Climate Change, U.N. Chief Says

New York Times - Somini Sengupta

António Guterres, the United Nations secretary general, said, “I am beginning to wonder how many more alarm bells must go off." CreditGiuseppe Lami/European Pressphoto Agency, via Shutterstock.

UNITED NATIONS — Nuclear weapons? Famine? Civil war? Nope.
The United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, on Thursday called climate change “the most systemic threat to humankind” and urged world leaders to curb their countries’ greenhouse gas emissions.
He didn’t say much, though, about the one world leader who had pulled out of the landmark United Nations climate change agreement: President Trump.
Instead, Mr. Guterres suggested that Mr. Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris accord nearly a year ago didn’t matter much. The American people, he said, were doing plenty.
“Independently of the position of the administration, the U.S. might be able to meet the commitments made in Paris as a country,” the secretary general said. “And, as you know, all around the world, the role of governments is less and less relevant.”
That may be overly optimistic. Sixteen American states and Puerto Rico have pledged to stick to the commitment that the United States made in the Paris agreement to reduce emissions by at least 26 percent by 2025. Those states are on track to keep their promise.
But they represent less than a half of the country’s population, and the United States as a country will most likely fall short of its Paris pledge as Mr. Trump dismantles environmental regulations, according to a 2017 study by the Rhodium Group, a private economic research company. And a group led by Michael R. Bloomberg, the United Nations special envoy on climate change, and Gov. Jerry Brown of California, came to the same conclusion in a report that relied on the same data.
The Paris accord is written in such a way that the United States, in fact, remains in the pact even though it announced its intent to pull out. The actual withdrawal does not happen until 2020.
Mr. Guterres is planning a summit meeting next year to goad world leaders to raise their emissions reductions targets. But few countries are even close to meeting the targets they set under the Paris agreement, which was drafted in November and December in 2015, according to independent analyses.
His warnings came a week after the World Meteorological Organization, a United Nations agency, reported that a barrage of extreme weather events had made 2017 the costliest year on record for such disasters, with an estimated $320 billion in losses.
Speaking at the United Nations headquarters on Thursday, Mr. Guterres said floods in South Asia had affected 41 million people and that drought had driven 900,000 people from their homes in Africa.
“I am beginning to wonder how many more alarm bells must go off before the world rises to the challenge,” he said. “We know it can be hard to address problems perceived to be years or decades away. But climate impacts are already upon us.”
Asked about the looming danger of floods and landslides facing hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, Mr. Guterres said he had urged Bangladesh’s government to relocate them to higher ground. Bangladesh’s government has said it is preparing to relocate the most vulnerable refugees to an island in the Bay of Bengal, itself vulnerable to the rising sea.
Mr. Guterres would not comment on those specific efforts except to say that “we believe higher ground is the best place.”

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U.S. Judge Dismisses Exxon Lawsuit To Stop Climate Change Probes

Reuters - Jonathan Stempel

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A federal judge on Thursday dismissed Exxon Mobil Corp’s (XOM.N) lawsuit seeking to stop New York and Massachusetts from probing whether the oil and gas company covered up its knowledge about climate change and lied to investors and the public about it.

The logo of Exxon Mobil Corporation is shown on a monitor above the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in New York, December 30, 2015. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson/File Photo

U.S. District Judge Valerie Caproni in Manhattan rejected as “implausible” Exxon’s argument that the states’ Democratic attorneys general, Eric Schneiderman and Maura Healey, were pursuing politically motivated, bad faith fraud investigations in order to violate its constitutional rights.
Caproni dismissed the lawsuit with prejudice, meaning the Irving, Texas-based company cannot bring it again.
Exxon is evaluating its legal options, spokesman Scott Silvestri said in an email.
“We believe the risk of climate change is real and we want to be part of the solution,” he added. “We’ve invested about $8 billion on energy efficiency and low-emission technologies such as carbon capture and next generation biofuels.”
The case is one of several, including shareholder and employee lawsuits, centered on whether Exxon has for decades lied about climate change, including its impact on energy prices and the environment and its ability to develop reserves, and taken public positions inconsistent with what it knew.
Schneiderman, in a statement, welcomed the end of what he called Exxon’s “frivolous, nonsensical lawsuit that wrongfully attempted to thwart a serious state law enforcement investigation.”
Healey called Caproni’s decision “a turning point in our investigation and a victory for the people.”
Exxon sued in June 2016, after receiving subpoenas seeking documents about its historical understanding of climate change, and communications with interest groups and shareholders.
The company accused Schneiderman and Healey of conspiring to “silence and intimidate one side of the public policy debate,” violating its rights to free speech and due process and against unreasonable searches.

Much of Exxon’s case was based on a March 2016 news conference with the attorneys general and former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, which it called a bid to coerce its adoption of policies that they and climate change activists preferred.
Caproni, however, said “nothing that was said can fairly be read to constitute declaration of a political vendetta against Exxon.”
She said the belief by Schneiderman and Healey, “apparently” shared by Exxon, that climate change is real does not mean they had no reason to believe Exxon may have fraudulently “sowed confusion” to bolster its bottom line.
Nowhere, she said, did Exxon suggest that the attorneys general believed the company “was itself confused about the causes or risks of climate change.”
The case is Exxon Mobil Corp et al v Schneiderman et al, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 17-02301.

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29/03/2018

'Harder And Riskier': Carbon Removal Needed If Paris Goals Don't Rise

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

Greenhouse gas emission cuts must be at least 20 per cent deeper than pledged under the Paris climate accord or the world will have to begin the costly direct removal of atmospheric carbon to avoid dangerous climate change, a new study argues.
The Germany-based researchers examined the action needed if nations failed to deliver greater carbon curbs by 2030 but still kept global warming to under 2 degrees, compared with pre-industrial levels.
"Each tonne of CO2 we don't emit, we don't have to remove from the atmosphere afterwards in an expensive and strenuous way," said Jessica Strefler from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and the lead author of the paper published on Thursday in Environmental Research Letters.

Emissions impossible? Delays in cutting emissions make it more likely that carbon will have to be directly captured if dangerous climate change is to be avoided.

Computer simulations indicate an industry "comparable" to the size of the global petroleum sector, and able to capture and store at least 5 billion tonnes of C02 annually, will be required - and possibly much larger.
Such carbon removal - whether by reafforestation ($31 per tonne) or direct air capture ($652 per tonne) - would be costly. "One way of paying for these technologies is imposing a price on carbon emissions and using these revenues to pay for carbon dioxide removal," Dr Strefler told Fairfax Media.
Strengthened Paris goals - known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs) - could preclude the need for carbon extraction but only if they were sharply increased.
"We would have to roughly halve 2030 emissions compared to current pledges, and halve them again every decade until 2050," Dr Strefler said. "If we do not strengthen the NDCs significantly, CO2 reduction will be necessary to achieve the 2-degree target."
The projections underscore the challenges nations will face when delegates gather in Katowice, Poland, in December. Australia, which has pledged to cut 2005-level carbon emissions by 26-28 per cent by 2030, will be among the countries pressed to do more.
Evidence of climate change mounts, and includes the past four years recording "exceptionally warm" temperatures. Last year was the hottest year on record that was not an El Nino year, while the Arctic - the world's fastest-changing region - just completed its warmest winter.

IMAGE

Pep Canadell, a research scientist with the CSIRO and executive director of the Global Carbon Project, said the German study used a simplified model that, if anything, underestimated the scale of the challenge.
For instance, it assumed a global carbon price of $US50 per tonne by 2020 for a cost-effective scenario - "something very far from our real world", Dr Canadell said.
"For every year we delay reaching peak emissions and decline, the harder and riskier it will get to avoid the worst impacts of climate change," he said.
"[It's] riskier because we will need to rely more on CO2 removal at scales well beyond what we can achieve from planting trees and producing ever more bioenergy."
An inter-generational ethical issue is rapidly emerging, "leaving the hard parts" for the next generation to take care of, such as the removal of atmospheric CO2, he said.
Preliminary data for 2017 shows emissions from fossil fuels and industry rose 1.5 per cent from a year earlier, resuming growth after stabilising for the first time in decades between 2014 and 2016, the World Meteorological Organisation said in its State of the Global Climate in 2017 report.

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10 Things: All About Ice

NASA - Kristen Walbolt

Credit: Michael Studinger, Operation IceBridge project scientist. More on this image ›

1. Earth’s changing cryosphere

This year, NASA will launch two satellite missions that will increase our understanding of Earth’s frozen reaches. Snow, ice sheets, glaciers, sea ice and permafrost, known as the cryosphere, act as Earth’s thermostat and deep freeze, regulating temperatures by reflecting heat from the Sun and storing most of our fresh water.

2. GRACE-FO: Building on a legacy and forging ahead

The next Earth science satellites set to launch are twins! The identical satellites of the GRACE Follow-On mission will build on the legacy of their predecessor GRACE by also tracking the ever-changing movement of water around our planet, including Earth’s frozen regions.GRACE-FO, a partnership between NASA and the German Research Center for Geosciences (GFZ), will provide critical information about how the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are changing. GRACE-FO, workingtogether, will measure the distance between the two satellites to within 1 micron (much less than the width of a human hair) to determine the mass below.

Greenland has been losing about 280 gigatons of ice per year on average, and Antarctica has lost almost 120 gigatons a year with indications that both melt rates are increasing. A single gigaton of water would fill about 400,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools; each gigaton represents a billion tons of water.

3. ICESat-2: 10,000 laser pulses a second

In September, NASA will launch ICESat-2, which uses a laser instrument to precisely measure the changing elevation of ice around the world, allowing scientists to see whether ice sheets and glaciers are accumulating snow and ice or getting thinner over time. ICESat-2 will also make critical measurements of the thickness of sea ice from space. Its laser instrument sends 10,000 pulses per second to the surface and will measure the photons’ return trip to satellite. The trip from ICESat-2 to Earth and back takes about 3.3 milliseconds.

4. Seeing less sea ice

Summertime sea ice in the Arctic Ocean now routinely covers about 40 percent less area than it did in the late 1970s, when continuous satellite observations began. This kind of significant change could increase the rate of warming already in progress and affect global weather patterns.

5. The snow we drink

In the western United States, 1 in 6 people rely on snowpack for water. NASA field campaigns such as the Airborne Snow Observatory and SnowEx seek to better understand how much water is held in Earth’s snow cover, and how we could ultimately measure this comprehensively from space.

6. Hidden in the ground

Permafrost – permanently frozen ground in the Arctic that contains stores of heat-trapping gases such as methane and carbon dioxide – is thawing at faster rates than previously observed. Recent studies suggest that within three to four decades, this thawing could be releasing enough greenhouse gases to make Arctic permafrost a net source of carbon dioxide rather than a sink. Through airborne and field research on missions such as CARVE and ABoVE – the latter of which will put scientists back in the field in Alaska and Canada this summer – NASA scientists are trying to improve measurements of this trend in order to better predict global impact.

7. Breaking records over cracking ice

Last year was a record-breaking one for Operation IceBridge, NASA’s aerial survey of polar ice. For the first time in its nine-year history, the mission carried out seven field campaigns in the Arctic and Antarctic in a single year. In total, the IceBridge scientists and instruments flew over 214,000 miles, the equivalent of orbiting the Earth 8.6 times at the equator.

On March 22, NASA completed the first IceBridge flight of its spring Arctic campaign with a survey of sea ice north of Greenland. This year marks the 10th Arctic spring campaign for IceBridge. The flights continue until April 27 extending the mission’s decade-long mapping of the fastest-changing areas of the Greenland Ice Sheet and measuring sea ice thickness across the western Arctic basin.

8. OMG

Researchers were back in the field this month in Greenland with NASA’s Oceans Melting Greenland survey. The airborne and ship-based mission studies the ocean’s role in melting Greenland’s ice. Researchers examinetemperatures, salinity and other properties of North Atlantic waters along the more than 27,000 miles (44,000 km) of jagged coastline.

9. DIY glacier modeling

Computer models are critical tools for understanding the future of a changing planet, including melting ice andrising seas. A new NASA sea level simulator lets you bury Alaska’s Columbia glacier in snow, and, year by year, watch how it responds. Or you can melt the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets and trace rising seas as they inundate the Florida coast.

10. Ice beyond Earth

Ice is common in our solar system. From ice packed into comets that cruise the solar system to polar ice caps on Mars to Europa and Enceladus—the icy ocean moons of Jupiter and Saturn—water ice is a crucial ingredient in the search for life was we know it beyond Earth.

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28/03/2018

Study Asserts Climate Change Could Make South Asia Uninhabitable In Our Lifetime

Futurism - Chelsea Gohd

New research shows how, by the year 2100, many regions in South Asia could become so hot that humans could no longer survive there.

Foggy Morning India Gate. Prasenjeet Gautam

Climate Change
The consequences of climate change are not only real and imminent, but increasingly catastrophic.
Currently, climate change has been attributed to dangerously increasing temperatures, sea levels rising, the extinction of a variety of species, and much more.
Without fierce opposition, the effects of climate change will only become more and more destructive. Natural disasters, mass flooding, food shortages and other crises are all possible (some already happening, in fact) if current trends continue.
One part of the world may even become uninhabitable in our lifetime.
Elfatih Eltahir, a professor at MIT, recently published new research in the journal Science Advances that shows how, by the end of the century, areas in South Asia could be too hot for humans to survive there.
In a Skype interview from Khartoum, Sudan with CBC News, Eltahir said, “The risk of the impacts of climate change in that region could be quite severe.”
Eltahir and his colleagues analyzed this projected situation under two conditions: a “business-as-usual” model and a model in which we increase our efforts to mitigate emissions.
The team concluded that the “business-as-usual” model was not only most likely, but would yield unlivable conditions by the year 2100.

How long will deadly India heatwave continue? BBC News

The Only Way is Forward
The effects of the projected heat waves will not fall over sparse landscapes that would be easily escapable.
They will wash over the densely populated, agricultural areas of South Asia, directly threatening the lives of countless inhabitants who — because many of the people living there live in poverty — will be essentially trapped in the deadly conditions.
Climate change has already taken lives, and isn’t slowing down.
This deadly heat wave scenario would only be a piece of the puzzle in the year 2100.
Where will the people of the agricultural regions of South Asia go if the rest of the planet is also facing the catastrophic effects of global warming? (That is, of course, if they are able to leave at all in future socioeconomic conditions.)
The only way is forward, and the only way forward includes our best efforts against climate change.

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Anti-Pipeline Campaigners Found Not Guilty By Judge Because 'Protest Against Climate Change Crisis' Was Legal 'Necessity'

The Independent - Andrew Buncombe

'We're part of the the movement that is standing up and saying we won’t let this go by on our watch'

More than a dozen protesters who clambered into holes dug for a high pressure gas pipeline said they had been found not responsible by a judge after hearing them argue their actions to try and stop climate change were a legal “necessity”.
Karenna Gore, the daughter of former Vice President Al Gore, was among more than 198 people who were arrested because of their 2015 actions protesting the pipeline in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. Thirteen people were to go on trial this week, though prosecutors downgraded their original criminal charges to one of civil infraction.

Karenna Gore said the protesters were part of a movement that was not allowed to let such things happen 'on our watch'.

Speaking outside the court afterwards, Ms Gore, 44, Director of the Centre for Earth Ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York, said the court’s decision was historic. “What happened today was really important,” she said.
“The people….were found not responsible by reason of necessity. The irony is that we are making ourselves responsible. We’re part of the the movement that is standing up and saying we won’t let this go by on our watch. We won’t act like nothing’s wrong.”
On Tuesday, Judge Mary Ann Driscoll of West Roxbury District Court, found all 13 defendants not responsible, the equivalent of not guilty in a criminal case. She did so after each of the defendants addressed the judge and explained why they were driven to try and halt the pipeline’s construction.

Roxbury Defendants

Marla Marcum of the Climate Change Disobedience Centre, which supported the activists, said that each of the 13 had addressed the judge about why they had been part of the protests against the pipeline, which was constructed by Houston-based company Spectra Energy.
“At the end, she said they were all not responsible by reason of legal necessity,” she said. She said the group had an audio recording of the hearing which it intended to post online.
Neither Ms Driscoll or the court clerk was available for comment. However, one member of the court’s staff who asked not to be named, told The Independent the judge had found them not responsible. The person denied, however, that the judge had made the ruling on the grounds of legal necessity.

The environmentalist and academic Bill McKibben, who was to appear as a defence witness for the defendants, said on Twitter: “Good golly! A few minutes ago a Boston judge acquitted 13 pipeline protesters on the grounds that the climate crisis made it necessary for them to commit civil disobedience. This may be a first in America.”
Spectra Energy, which was last year bought by the Canadian firm Enbridge Inc, did not immediately respond to inquiries.

Mothers Out Front in West Roxbury

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AGL Lines Liddell Up For Pumped Storage, Dismisses Chinese 'Approach'

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

AGL Energy is proceeding with plans to replace its Liddell power station with other energy sources including pumped hydro, dismissing a report that a Chinese textile group offered to buy the ailing power plant.
The nation's biggest energy company said it had not had any approach from Shandong Ruyi, the owner of the giant Cubbie Station cotton farm.
A News Corp newspaper reported the Chinese firm had contacted the Prime Minister's office in December, indicating an interest in buying the Hunter Valley power plant that AGL plans to close in 2022.

AGL Energy's Liddell power plant, with Lake Liddell in the foreground, and the company's Bayswater power plant behind. Photo: Simone De Peak

"We remain committed to our NSW Generation Plan as the most economic way to fully replace the Liddell plant, as reviewed and confirmed by [the Australian Energy Market Operator]," an AGL spokesman said.
It's understood the PM's office did not inform AGL of any Chinese interest and considers the report to be a "non-story".
Minister for the Environment and Energy, Josh Frydenberg, told Sky News he was "aware there had been expressions of interest" in Liddell "but it is up to those companies to directly approach AGL".
Doug Jackson, an AGL executive group manager, told Fairfax Media that Lake Liddell - which currently provides cooling for the adjacent power station - is one of two sites in the Hunter now being looked at for possible pumped hydro.
The two plants, still at the pre-feasibility stage, were in the order of 200-250 megawatts of capacity each, compared with the 1680-MW capacity of the coal-fired plant.
Pumped hydro typically requires an upper and lower reservoir. During times of low-cost power - such as during windy days - the operator pumps water to the higher reservoir, to be released to generate hydropower when power prices are high.
Don Harwin, the NSW Minister for Energy, said the state was keen to boost pumped hydro, particularly to support the three renewable energy priority zones announced last week. An Australian National University study last year identified 8600 such sites in NSW, and the Berejiklian government is looking to prioritise development of the most promising pumped storage areas.
“Pumped hydro is 'nature’s battery' and the world’s most established bulk energy storage technology, making up 97 per cent of global energy storage capacity,” Mr Harwin said.
“We need a mix of generation sources to maintain our security into the future. If we can harness our natural assets we can have an affordable, clean and secure energy future for NSW,” he said.
AGL's Mr Jackson declined to specify the location of the second Hunter site. He added that mine voids could be among the suitable locations.
Either project, though, could turn out to be much cheaper and faster to build than the much bigger Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro plan touted by the Turnbull government.
Current estimates put the cost of that project at more than $2000 per megawatt of storage, or in excess of $4 billion.
"Lake Liddell is a pretty easy one to get going in a few short years," Mr Jackson said, noting the existing access to power transmission among its advantages.

The Snowy Hydro 2.0 project has been touted by the Turnbull government. Photo: Supplied

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