30/12/2019

The Year In Climate Change: Leaders Keep Ignoring The Science, And This Is Not Fine

CNET - 

Commentary: My world's on fire, how 'bout yours?

I think about the "This Is Fine" dog a lot. You know the one: Animated yellow dog, staring into the middle distance, cup of coffee in its hand, engulfed by flames. In the original webcomic, a 2013 six-panel piece by artist KC Green, the dog does nothing to avert the obviously catastrophic situation it finds itself in. Instead, it remarks "This is fine" as its skin melts away and its eyeballs seep out of its head like goo.
In 2019, it seems prescient. But the fire isn't contained to one tiny room anymore.
Now the world is on fire. In July, the Earth sweltered through its hottest month on record. The Amazon roasted in August, with more than 80,000 fires reported in Brazil alone. California was ablaze in November, cutting power and forcing residents to flee their homes. The Arctic burned. Australia suffered through unprecedented bushfires. The record books are being constantly updated.
Despite this, carbon emissions, primarily from the fossil fuel industry, continue to rise across the globe, with no signs of slowing down. If we are to limit warming to below 2 degrees Celsius by 2100, things need to change dramatically. And yet many huge emitters are not on track to meet their 2030 pledges as set out by the United Nations. Against the backdrop of fire and smoke, leaders of the biggest carbon emitting nations in the world seemingly just sip their coffees and put their feet up.
This is fine.
***
In KC Green's 2013 comic, the dog eventually melts away in the fire. KC Green/Gunshow
But in 2019 there was something of a reckoning.
It arrived in the form of a pig-tailed, 16-year-old girl with a two-by-two cardboard sign. In striking black letters, her sign read: "Skolstrejk fӧr klimatet." Starting in August 2018, Greta Thunberg began this "School Strike For Climate," sign in hand, sitting on the concrete outside the Swedish parliament, demanding action on climate change. She drew worldwide attention. By the end of 2018, students had held strikes in over 270 cities across the world.
It was the beginning of a movement that continued to gather momentum through the year. In September, 7 million people took to the streets again for global climate protests, timed to coincide with the United Nations Climate Action Summit. The protests saw Thunberg, and other student activists around the world, pleading with policymakers and governments to combat the climate crisis.
Thunberg's movement saw her named Time's Person of the Year in 2019. More importantly, it inspired discussions around climate change to escalate, becoming more urgent and more aggressive. The language began to change. We stopped talking about climate change and started talking about the climate crisis. States, countries and scientists declared a "climate emergency," leading the Oxford Dictionary to award the term its word of the year, as usage soared 10,796%.
This is not fine.
***
Firebreather
It's not fine, and I'm struggling to breathe.
As CNET's science editor, I spend many hours a month reading climate change studies, but for the first time in my life, I can feel the effects of climate change. I can look out my window and see them in the thick, gray smoke clouds settling over the horizon.
After bushfires torched 164,000 hectares of forest north west of Sydney in November, a dense veil of smoke blanketed the city for weeks. In the harbor, the white sails of the Opera House were consumed by a veil of smoke and the steel beams of the Harbour Bridge seemed to fade into the haze.
Former fire service chief Greg Mullins warned Australia's federal government the 2019 bushfire season could be "catastrophic" in April and again in May, suggesting climate change had worsened drought conditions and could cause mega fires the service "just can't put out." By spring, those fires started burning. It's now the middle of summer. They are still burning.
Scarily, this feels like the new normal. As the planet gets hotter, it makes extreme climate events like the bushfires more and more likely. I check the Air Quality Index (AQI) three or four times a day, hoping the particle pollution is rated as anything other than "hazardous." When the bushfires began in early November, Google saw a dramatic spike in searches for "air quality."
Living and working in the inner city has been giving me (and countless others) mild respiratory trouble, but it's nothing compared with where the fires have been raging. Hundreds have lost their homes. Six people lost their lives.
The Sydney Opera House, blanketed by smoke. James D. Morgan/Getty
As the crisis worsened, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison pushed the climate crisis to the side. "There is a time and a place to debate controversial issues and important issues, right now it's important to focus on the needs of Australians who need our help," he said in November. In December, as the intensity and scale of the fires continued to increase, Morrison fled, reportedly taking a business class flight to Hawaii for a holiday.
The Deputy Prime Minister, Michael McCormack, slammed those raising concerns about climate change during the crisis, calling senators from the left Greens party "inner-city raving lunatics."
Many of those who had lost their homes did not agree, protesting outside New South Wales' Parliament House with buckets of ash in their hand days after the statement was made. After tipping the charred remains of his two-bedroom home onto the ground, one protestor declared that now was exactly the time to be talking about climate change.
Those protestors don't believe the carbon dioxide we're pumping into the air started the fires. But they believe it is exacerbating them. Climate change is making the bushfire season longer. It seems many politicians disagree.
In the wake of the bushfires, Morrison said there was no scientific evidence linking the bushfires with carbon emissions and climate change. There is.
And former deputy Prime Minister, Barnaby Joyce, claimed the fires were the result of changes in the sun's magnetic field. At best, that's poor understanding of the science. At worst, it's a blatant lie.
None of this is fine.
***
Climate culture war
This year the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released two special reports focused on how climate change affects the land and how climate change affects the oceans and cryosphere. In May, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) released a damning analysis of the world's ecosystems, suggesting the climate crisis could leave up to 1 million species extinct.
More dire warnings were heard during the UN Climate Change Summit in September and December's Climate Change Conference in Madrid. Every week -- no, every day -- there is a new peer-reviewed scientific paper in the world's most prestigious science journals. The pages of Nature, Science, The Lancet and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences are stacked with new reports, revised estimates and terrifying models of future calamity.
All this research features the expertise of hundreds of scientists and researchers, using tens of thousands of sources to provide the most comprehensive, up-to-the-minute examination of the planet we can muster. They keep gathering data, it keeps telling them the same things. There is a consensus: Humans are accelerating global warming.
"The world is not ending due to climate change," says Katrin Meissner, director of the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New South Wales. "The planet will survive and life on the planet will survive. But ... climate change will endanger health, livelihoods, food security, drinking water supply, and ecosystems.
"The changes won't be easily reversible, some will certainly be irreversible on the timescales of human lives, and the changes won't necessarily happen smoothly."
Almost as soon as scientists began sounding the alarm, science has been under attack. In 2019, the internet is awash with climate denialism. You only need to read the comments on CNET's coverage of the Amazon fires, or our reporting on the latest climate research, to see the extent of the pushback. My Gmail inbox is tortured. Facebook posts, Twitter threads and TikTok videos are war zones.
Worryingly, over the past 12 months, we've seen those attacks come not just from message boards and anonymous Twitter users, but from some of the most powerful people in the world.
Arguments have been weaponized on both sides of the political spectrum. US President Donald Trump is taking jabs at Greta Thunberg, sarcastically describing her as a "very happy young girl looking forward to a bright future." Extinction Rebellion activists shut down the London Underground in October, leading to nasty clashes with commuters and law enforcement. It's no longer believers versus denialists -- it's left versus right.
In 2019, the climate crisis has become firmly entrenched as a battleground in the never-ending culture wars. Environmental policies are being wound back in the US, Brazil and China. The US has pulled out of the UN Paris Agreement that calls for nations to plan and mitigate the effects of global warming.
Greta Thunberg has continued to call for action on climate change, taking her sign on a global tour. Fabrice Coffrini/Getty
Carbon emissions are irrelevant. Glacier collapse is trivial. Rising sea levels are being ignored. Science is dying a slow death and faith is being eroded by politicians looking to score points over their opposition. It's been happening for years, but in 2019 it was more obvious than ever.
When Thunberg spoke before the US congress in September, her message was simple: "I don't want you to listen to me, I want you to listen to the scientists."
The overwhelming majority of those scientists make it crystal clear: Unless we reduce our emissions -- dramatically and rapidly -- we will find ourselves living on a planet hotter than ever before. The next decade looms as one of the most important to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).
We are only just beginning to understand what a hotter Earth looks like, the extreme weather events we will experience, the health problems that will arise and the vast changes to the land and the ocean the children will inherit.
In 2019, their voices swelled. They started shouting. They took placards and signs and descended upon government buildings, parks, streets and cities. Their message was resoundingly clear.
This is not fine.

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Climate Science Discoveries Of The Decade: New Risks Scientists Warned About In The 2010s

InsideClimate News - Bob Berwyn

 A decade of ice, ocean and atmospheric studies found systems nearing dangerous tipping points. As the evidence mounted, countries worldwide began to see the risk.
Researching the Petermann Glacier. Whitney Shefte/Washington Post via Getty Images
The 2010s may go down in environmental history as the decade when the fingerprints of climate change became evident in extreme weather events, from heat waves to destructive storms, and climate tipping points once thought to be far off were found to be much closer.
It was the decade when governments worldwide woke up to the risk and signed the Paris climate agreement, yet still failed to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions at the pace and scale needed. And when climate scientists, seeing the evidence before them, cast away their reluctance to publicly advocate for action.
The sum of the decade's climate science research, compiled in a series of reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), suggests global warming is pushing many planetary systems toward a breakdown.
New studies showed polar ice caps melting and sea level rising much faster than just 10 years ago. Ocean researchers showed how marine heat waves kill corals and force fish to move northward, affecting food supplies for millions of people in developing countries. They tracked changes to crucial ocean currents and concluded that hurricanes will intensify faster in a warming world.
Together, the research showed how important it will be to cap the global temperature rise as far below 2 degrees Celsius—the Paris Agreement goal—as possible.

Feedback Loops on the Greenland Ice Sheet
At the start of the decade, it was unclear how fast the Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets would melt. As recently as the 1990s, melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet was balanced by the buildup of new snow and ice, offering some hope that sea level rise would be slow, allowing coastal communities time to adapt.
By the end of 2019, a study published in the scientific journal Nature showed the Greenland Ice Sheet was melting seven times faster than it had been in the 1990s. That's on pace with the IPCC's worst-case climate scenario, with Greenland alone contributing 2 to 5 inches of sea level rise by 2100. Another study, looking at evidence in fossilized shells, showed temperatures are very near a threshold that will melt most of the ice sheet.



Scientists discovered feedback loops and new ways earth's systems interact to melt the ice. Global warming is expanding ice slabs beneath Greenland's snowy areas, hastening runoff and sea level rise. In Antarctica, they showed how global warming is shifting winds and pushing warmer water under floating ice shelves—both of which could contribute to rapid disintegration of ice shelves with a subsequent surge of sea level rise.
"The rate and magnitude of Greenland Ice Sheet mass loss, and of ice loss globally, has been dramatic," said Twila Moon, a climate researcher with the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

How Sea Ice Loss Influences the Atmosphere
Many studies in the second half of the decade showed how important it is to keep the global temperature rise as far below 2 degrees Celsius as possible to avoid triggering tipping points that would have cascading consequences. Arctic sea ice is one of the big concerns.
Even now, in its diminished state, the summer Arctic sea ice is a 1.6 million square-mile shield that reflects incoming solar radiation back to space. The more it melts, the more darker-colored ocean can absorb heat, speeding up the planet's overall warming.
At 2 degrees Celsius warming, Arctic Ocean sea ice will probably melt completely, said National Snow and Ice Data Center climate researcher Walt Meier. "Some ice probably will persist if warming is limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius," Meier said. He noted that research has suggested the ice could recover fairly quickly—if greenhouse gas concentrations are reduced enough to drop the temperature.



One intriguing question has been how the loss of Arctic sea ice will affect weather patterns in North America, Europe and Asia.
Melting that much of Earth's icebox could alter wind patterns that shunt weather systems around the Northern Hemisphere, scientists reasoned early in the decade. A study in 2012 suggested a mechanism: Sea ice melt alters the jet stream by reducing the temperature contrast between the Arctic and the mid-latitudes. As the jet stream weakens, it enables areas of rainy weather or hot, dry conditions to linger longer over a given area, leading to extreme rainfall or heat waves and drought.
As the decade ended, studies seemed to support that early conclusion. Research published by Michael Mann, Stefan Rahmstorf and others showed how heat waves, floods and wildfires are linked with a jet stream pattern that, in turn, is related to an over-heated Arctic. In a climate warmed by greenhouse gases, the jet stream is more likely to set up in a pattern that causes extremes to linger longer over Europe and North America.

Arctic Melting Also Effects Ocean Currents
Another major advance in climate research this decade relates to how the melting Arctic will affect a key Atlantic Ocean current that balances Earth's climate by carrying warm, salty water north in the upper layers of the ocean and colder water southward in the ocean depths.
Early in the decade, scientists were still speculating about whether such a slowdown was happening, but now, "for the first time the IPCC has confirmed that the AMOC has slowed down, as predicted by models," Rahmstorf said.
Slowing of the AMOC, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, has been identified as one of the main tipping points in the planet's climate system. Changes in the circulation "have been responsible for some of the strongest and most rapid climate shifts during the Quaternary Period (the past 2.6 million years)," one study said.
There are already signs that the weakening of the Atlantic circulation is having an effect on U.S. fisheries and storms. Ice melting off Greenland as the Arctic warms is believed to play a key role. Credit: NASA
Total collapse of the current, still seen as unlikely, would raise sea level by 30 inches around the North Atlantic, but even a slowdown will have a similar effect, to a lesser degree.
"The current is balanced, in part, by the slope of the sea surface as it climbs away from the East coast toward the center of the North Atlantic Ocean gyre," explained Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann. "If the current slows, that slope must decrease, which is accomplished by the sea surface rising along the coast. That can add as much as an extra foot to sea level rise over the next century over parts of the East Coast."
The slowdown will likely push tropical rainfall belts southward, disrupting agriculture and ocean ecosystems. A study in 2016 showed how global warming is shifting other currents in ways that could bring more intense storms to land areas, like the rainstorms that brought record flooding to Japan.

Marine Heat Waves Drive Ecosystem Tipping Points
Scientists have long known that the oceans are absorbing about 93 percent of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases, but it wasn't until the last few years that they showed how that's manifesting in marine heat waves that are driving some ocean ecosystems to tipping points.
The most visible might be the mass die-offs of coral reefs in 2015 and 2016 as the oceans seethed at near record warmth for months on end.
The impacts of another marine heat wave, known as the Pacific warm blob, cascaded through Pacific Ocean ecosystems in 2014 and 2015, causing widespread disruption to the food chain and promoting toxic algae blooms. Another began forming in the Pacific in 2019.



Marine heat waves don't just affect the water. The Pacific warm blob was also linked with California's extreme drought that pushed some inland forest ecosystems past the brink. The large area of stagnant heat over the ocean blocked cooler marine air from reaching the coast, enabling the heat to build up.
Since the 1920s, marine heat waves have become 34 percent more frequent, and research shows about 87 percent of them can be attributed to human-caused global warming.

Potential for West Antarctic Ice Sheet Collapse
At the start of the 2010s, scientists were just beginning to understand how vulnerable parts of Antarctica are to human-caused global warming. New studies this past decade showed that what was once considered a nearly invincible fortress of ice is crumbling at the edges.
Just a little more warming could push parts of the Antarctic ice sheets past a tipping point that would raise sea level faster and higher than anticipated by the climate assessments commonly used for coastal planning around the world.
"I'd say one of the big things this decade includes the potential collapse of West Antarctica, based on new research," said University of Colorado climate scientist Mike MacFerrin. "Just this year, we have evidence that Antarctica's recent speedup of ice loss is, in fact, human-caused."



Concerns about an abrupt collapse of parts of Antarctica's ice shelves intensified in 2016 with a study suggesting that water from surface melting could seep deep into the ice, refreeze and split off huge slabs of the shelves in a relatively short time. Radar surveys showing the thinning of the Thwaites Glacier helped trigger a massive international research effort to track the melting in that area, and scientists are also watching the Pine Island Glacier for signs of disintegration.
The worst-case tipping point scenarios shouldn't be off the table, said Jason Box, a  climate scientist with the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland.
Box said the research showing destabilization of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is a key climate science advance of this past decade "that should have been like a real wake-up call moment," he said.

Connecting Climate Change to Weather Extremes
Only a few years ago, scientists were reluctant to connect any specific extreme weather event to global warming.
In 2011 and 2012, Rahmstorf and other scientists triggered debates when they wrote that there was strong evidence linking specific events or an increase in their numbers to the human influence on climate. Since then, scientists who specialize in attribution research have found global warming fingerprints on nearly every heat wave they've studied.
"Looking back over the past decade, it's astonishing how firmly we've moved out to the tails of the probability distribution. Extremes are common and are commonly attributed to human activities," said Oregon State University climate researcher Philip Mote. "We're living the worst-case scenario."



One area of research during the 2010s with ominous findings was how global warming affects the intensity tropical storms, including North Atlantic hurricanes that affect the densely populated East Coast of the U.S. A 2016 study tracked a persistent shift of storm tracks toward that area.
"We've seen extreme events, with every major ocean basin having at least one big, catastrophic hurricane in the last few years," said NOAA climate scientist Deke Arndt. "We had Dorian and Michael, with rapid intensification so early in its development and close to the equator," he said. "Every basin has come up with monstrous storms."

Seeing the Risks, More Scientists Are Speaking Out
The 2010s may also be remembered as the decade when scientists cast away their reluctance to advocate for political and social changes.
The research on global warming is now so compelling that "a growing number of scientists are starting to make increasingly direct, pointed, and public statements about climate change risks to society," said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with UCLA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
"My sense is that a key reason for this is the widening gap between physical reality and political reality," he said. "There is a growing sense that society is careening toward the abyss while we're collectively arguing about whether we should hit the brakes.
"Scientists who work in the climate domain are particularly, sometimes painfully, aware of the consequences that lie ahead if we continue on our current trajectory. And we're also aware that the emissions targets set forth in the Paris Agreement remain largely aspirational; we're currently still on a path to blow right past them."

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Satellites Show Glaciers Rapidly Shrinking From Climate Change

Space - 

The Earth's glaciers are in rapid retreat.
New results relying on five decades of satellite observations show extensive changes to glaciers at the Earth's north and south poles, a result of global warming.
Much of the data comes courtesy of the long-running Landsat mission, which is a series of Earth observation satellites managed by NASA and the United States Geological Survey. Having decades of data from a single line of similar satellites makes it much easier to see change over time. But other satellites are spotting changes as well, sometimes on timescales as short as a year or two.

Meltwater pools on the surface of Petermann Glacier in Greenland as seen by Landsat in June 2019. (Image credit: NASA/USGS)
Landsat images of glaciers photographed between 1972 and 2019 allowed glaciologist Mark Fahnestock of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, to create six-second time-lapse films showing changes in the ice.
"We now have this long, detailed record that allows us to look at what's happened in Alaska," Fahnestock said in a NASA statement. "When you play these movies, you get a sense of how dynamic these systems are and how unsteady the ice flow is."
Glaciers respond to global warming in different ways. For example, Alaska's Columbia glacier was pretty stable when the first Landsat satellite peered at it in 1972. It began a quick retreat in the mid-1980s; it now is 12.4 miles (20 kilometers) upstream from its first observed position nearly 48 years ago. Meanwhile, the nearby Hubbard Glacier has only moved three miles (five km) in the same 48 years, but a 2019 image showed a large area in the glacier where ice broke off. That "calving embayment," as geologists term it, is likely a sign of rapid change on the horizon.
"That calving embayment is the first sign of weakness from Hubbard glacier in almost 50 years — it's been advancing through the historical record," Fahnestock said, warning that the Columbia glacier showed similar signs of weakening before its rapid retreat decades ago.


The NASA-USGS Landsat program has been keeping its eyes on Earth's glaciers and ice sheets since 1972.
Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

 Michalea King, a doctoral student in earth sciences at Ohio State University, examined similar Landsat images from Greenland as far back as 1985 to see how global warming affected 200 glaciers there. These glaciers have retreated an average of three miles (five km) over the period of satellite observations that King studied.
"These glaciers are calving more ice into the ocean than they were in the past," King said in the same statement. "There is a very clear relationship between the retreat, and increasing ice mass losses from these glaciers, during the 1985-through-present record."
The glacial retreat is also causing different sorts of lakes to appear over time on the surface of the glacier and underground. James Lea, a glaciologist at the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom, found surface meltwater lakes on Greenland glaciers of up to three miles (five km) across. Lea used measurements gathered by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on the NASA-led Terra satellite for every day of every melt season over the last 20 years.
"We looked at how many lakes there are per year across the ice sheet and found an increasing trend over the last 20 years: a 27% increase in lakes," Lea said in the same statement. "We're also getting more and more lakes at higher elevations — areas that we weren't expecting to see lakes in until 2050 or 2060."
The change is so rapid that sometimes differences show up in just a year or two. For example, Devon Dunmire of the University of Colorado, Boulder, used microwave radar images from the European Space Agency's Sentinel-1 satellite to peer beneath the ice. Dunmire spotted lakes in the George VI and Wilkins ice shelves near the Antarctica peninsula, including a few that remained liquid during winter.
"Not much is known about distribution and quantity of these subsurface lakes, but this water appears to be prevalent on the ice shelf near the Antarctic peninsula," said Dunmire, who is a graduate student in atmospheric and oceanic sciences, in the same statement. "It's an important component to understand, because meltwater has been shown to destabilize ice shelves."
The scientists presented their work at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco on Dec. 9.

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