Using The Big Freeze To Deny Climate Change... Stupidity Or Cynicism?

The Guardian - Michael M Mann

The reaction to the polar vortex reminds us it is important to have a citizenry who can distinguish between scientific fact and fiction

Sunrise in Chicago, Illinois, as temperatures plunged to Arctic levels on 31 January. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images

Michael E Mann Michael E Mann is distinguished professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University. He is the co-author of The Madhouse Effect

The winters of the early 1970s were very cold and snowy in the northeastern United States where I grew up – as elsewhere around the US and Europe. I remember snowfalls that came up to my chin (though, of course, I was only a few feet tall back then). We now call those “old-fashioned winters”, precisely because they have grown so rare as a consequence of – yes – global warming.
If you’re younger than I am (I became a demi-centenarian three years ago), those winters are likely to be outside the range of your experience. And so it may seem plausible to you that cold snaps, that in reality simply reflect the sort of weather that was commonplace just decades ago, might constitute “record” or “unprecedented” cold.
Such a myopic view of weather extremes can be exploited by those who look to cast doubt on the overwhelming scientific consensus behind human-caused climate change. Very much in that vein, Donald Trump recently asserted in a tweet about the cold spell in the midwest that “windchill temperatures are reaching minus 60 degrees, the coldest ever recorded”. He added: “What the hell is going on with Global Waming [sic]? Please come back fast, we need you!”

The Grand Haven Pier in St Joseph, Michigan, was covered by amazing formations of giant icicles Photograph: Mike Kline / Barcroft Media

Neglect, for the moment, that “global waming” isn’t a thing and that, as we have come to expect, almost none of the claims in Trump’s tweet are true – the coldest wind-chill temperatures recorded for the midwest are close to minus 70F (minus 57C), and for the US overall below minus 100F (minus 73C). Might he have a point?
For example, if we were seeing more frequent cold extremes, would this contradict the theory of human-caused global warming? No. Scientists increasingly think that climate change may cause a more frequent breakdown of the “polar vortex” of the northern hemisphere (the tight band of winds in the upper atmosphere that, typically, confine the cold North Pole air masses to the Arctic, loosely associated with the jet stream). The amplified warming of the Arctic caused by the melting of sea ice reduces the temperature contrast between the equator and pole. It is that contrast that maintains the polar vortex and jet stream. As the vortex breaks down, the jet stream slows and exhibits broader north-south wiggles, just as a river crossing almost level territory exhibits broad meanders as it snakes its way to the coastline.

That makes it easier for pieces of the cold Arctic air masses to break off and wobble down into middle-latitude continental regions such as North America and Europe, precisely what happened with the recent cold air outbreak in the US. But let’s return to the other first question: are we seeing an increase in record cold? So far, in the first month of 2019, two all-time cold records were set – in towns in Illinois. Meanwhile, there have been 35 all-time records for heat (many of them set in the extreme summer heatwave that is baking Australia and scorching cities such as Adelaide). That’s a ratio of 18 hot records to each cold record.

Michael Mann says climate deniers have ‘weaponised ignorance’ Photograph: Supplied

In the absence of planetary warming, that ratio should be one to one. Maybe, you say, it’s a fluke. After all, it’s only one month of data. But the ratio of warm to cold records is roughly two to one for the past decade.
We can now go a step further, “attributing” record warm spells to global warming by employing climate models to quantify the incidence of extreme events, both with and without the effect of human-caused greenhouse warming. The extreme European heatwave last summer was, according to one such estimate, made twice as likely by human-caused climate change. (In reality, this is probably an underestimate because the models do not capture some of the effects of a slowing jet stream analysed in some of my own recent research). So we’re seeing a trend toward more record heat, not record cold. And, even if we were seeing an increase in cold winter outbreaks in certain parts of the US and Europe, it wouldn’t necessarily contradict the case for climate change – it might even be symptomatic of it, associated with the breakdown in the polar vortex.
Let us return to Trump’s tweet, for it does not stand in isolation. It is part of a several-years-old pattern of denying the basic scientific evidence for human-caused climate change. Trump is plainly not the “genius” he has claimed to be, but he knows that climate change is real. We know this because he cited it as a reason to be granted a special dispensation to build a wall – a wall to protect his golf course in Ireland from the damaging effects of a rise in sea level.

 A New Yorker waits to cross a street during heavy snow fall in downtown Manhattan Photograph: Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images 

So, if it’s not due to ignorance, what is responsible for Trump’s continued climate-change denial? Could it be the same thing responsible for him outsourcing his energy and environmental policy to fossil fuel interests? Could it have something to do with Russian influence that some have suggested helped get him elected?
We may have some answers to these questions when special counsel Robert Mueller completes his investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election.
In any case, Trump’s repeated dismissive comments about human-caused climate change are an example of what I have referred to as “the weaponisation of ignorance”. The ignorance in this case isn’t Trump’s. He appears to know better. It’s the electorate’s.
Only with an ill-informed citizenry could you plausibly dismiss the consensus of the world’s scientists based upon a single cold spell. Trump and, more to the point, the fossil fuel interests whose bidding he is doing have weaponised the public’s poor understanding of science.
The great Carl Sagan presaged this very scenario in his classic work The Demon-Haunted World. Sagan feared a descent into ignorance and expressed his apprehension of a future in which “no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues”.
He worried about the emergence of a citizenry that is unable to differentiate between “what feels good and what’s true” and is therefore vulnerable to pseudo science and anti-science.
With the election of Donald Trump, have we finally arrived in the future that Sagan so feared? And if so, is there any escape from it? That remains to be seen.

Links

• 22 National Science Academies Urge Government Action on Climate Change
• Q&A: How is Arctic warming linked to the ‘polar vortex’ and other extreme weather?
• So far 2019 has set 35 records for heat and 2 for cold
• Australia is sweltering through record-breaking heat. And the worst is yet to come
• Record High Temps vs. Record Low Temps
• Heatwave made more than twice as likely by climate change, scientists find
• Look at This Embarrassing F*cking Moron
• Yes — Donald Trump IS A Threat To The Planet
• Australia's extreme heat is sign of things to come, scientists warn
• 'Our house is on fire': Greta Thunberg, 16, urges leaders to act on climate
• Teenage activist takes School Strikes 4 Climate Action to Davos
• Analysis warns of lack of progress on 2020 global emissions target
• David Attenborough tells Davos: ‘The Garden of Eden is no more’ 
• Antarctic expedition sets out to map Larsen C ice shelf 
• EU coal subsidy phase-out 'completely inconsistent with Paris deal'

Are We Living Through Climate Change’s Worst-Case Scenario?

The Atlantic - Robinson Meyer

“We’re a lot closer than we should be,” one Stanford scientist warned.

Smoke and steam billow from Belchatow Power Station in Poland, the site of the UN's 2018 climate conference. Kacper Pempel / Reuters

The year 2018 was not an easy one for planet Earth.
Sure, wind and solar energy kept getting cheaper, and an electric car became America’s best-selling luxury vehicle. But the most important metric of climatic health—the amount of heat-trapping gas entering the atmosphere—got suddenly and shockingly worse.
In the United States, carbon emissions leapt back up, making their largest year-over-year increase since the end of the Great Recession. This matched the trend across the globe. According to two major studies, greenhouse-gas emissions worldwide shot up in 2018—accelerating like a “speeding freight train,” as one scientist put it.
U.S. emissions do remain 11 percent below their 2007 peak, but that is one of the few bright spots in the data. Global emissions are now higher than ever. And the 2018 statistics are all the more dismal because greenhouse-gas emissions had previously seemed to be slowing or even declining, both in the United States and around the world.
Many economists expect carbon emissions to drop somewhat throughout the next few decades. But maybe they won’t. If 2018 is any indication, meekly positive energy trends will not handily reduce emissions, even in developed economies like the United States. It raises a bleak question: Are we currently on the worst-case scenario for climate change?
“We’re actually a lot closer than we should be; I can say that with confidence,” says Rob Jackson, an Earth scientist at Stanford and the chair of the Global Carbon Project, which leads the research tracking worldwide emissions levels.
When climate scientists want to tell a story about the future of the planet, they use a set of four standard scenarios called “representative concentration pathways,” or RCPs. RCPs are ubiquitous in climate science, appearing in virtually any study that uses climate models to investigate the 21st century. They’ve popped up in research about subjects as disparate as southwestern mega-droughts, future immigration flows to Europe, and poor nighttime sleep quality.Each RCP is assigned a number that describes how the climate will fare in the year 2100.
Generally, a higher RCP number describes a scarier fate: It means that humanity emitted more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere during the 21st century, further warming the planet and acidifying the ocean. The best-case scenario is called RCP 2.6. The worst case is RCP 8.5.“God help us if 8.5 turns out to be the right scenario,” Jackson told me. Under RCP 8.5, the world’s average temperature would rise by 4.9 degrees Celsius, or nearly 9 degrees Fahrenheit.
“That’s an inconceivable increase for global temperatures—especially when we think about them being global average temperatures,” he said. “Temperatures will be even higher in the northern latitudes, and higher over land than over the ocean.”
This scenario could still be in the planet’s future, according to Zeke Hausfather, an analyst and climate scientist at Berkeley Earth. Since 2005, total global greenhouse-gas emissions have most closely tracked the RCP 8.5 scenario, he says. “There may be good reasons to be skeptical of RCP 8.5’s late-century values, but observations to-date don’t really give us grounds to exclude it,” he recently wrote.
Even if we avoid RCP 8.5, the less dramatic possibilities still could lead to catastrophic warming. Jackson, the Stanford professor, warned that every emissions scenario that meets the Paris Agreement’s 2-degree Celsius “goal” assumes that humanity will soon develop technology to remove carbon directly from the atmosphere. Such technology has never existed at industrial scales.
“Even some [of the scenarios] for 3 degrees Celsius assume that at some point in the next 50 years, we will have large-scale industrial activities to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere,” he said. “It’s a very dangerous game, I think. We’re assuming that this thing we can’t do today will somehow be possible and cheaper in the future. I believe in tech, but I don’t believe in magic.”
Yet not all data suggest that we’re doomed to RCP 8.5 or equivalent amounts of warming, Hausfather cautions. If you look only at pollution from fossil-fuel burning—and not from land-use events like deforestation—then humanity’s recent record trends closer to RCP 4.5.
That’s good news, but only by comparison: RCP 4.5 still forecasts that global temperatures will rise by 2.4 degrees Celsius, enough to kill off nearly every coral reef and soar past the 2-degree target set out in the Paris Agreement on climate change.There are a few reasons it’s hard to say which RCP comes closest to our reality.
First, most of the RCPs tell roughly the same story about global emissions until about 2025 or 2030. Second, the RCPs describe emissions across the entire sweep of the 21st century—and the century mostly hasn’t happened yet. Trying to pick the most likely RCP in 2018 is a bit like trying to predict the precise depth of late-night snowfall at 4:32 a.m.
The RCP 8.5 scenario may also become less likely in years to come, even if major polluters like the United States, China, and India never pass muscular climate policy. RCP 8.5 says that the global coal industry will eventually become seven times bigger than it is today.
“It’s tough to claim that … that is a business-as-usual world,” Hausfather says. “It’s certainly a possible world, but we also live in a world today where solar is increasingly cheaper than coal.”That’s part of the reason the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will soon expand its list of standard scenarios. Its next major synthesis report, due to be published in 2021, will replace RCPs with five “socioeconomic pathways” that allow for a broader range of futures.
Jackson urged caution. “We don’t know yet what scenario we’re on,” he said. “I think most climate scientists will tell you that we’re below the 8.5 scenario. But every year that emissions increase like they have this year, it makes the 8.5 scenario more plausible.”
Jackson published his first academic paper in 1989, just a year after the NASA scientist James Hansen first warned Congress that global warming had begun in earnest. I asked whether he thought actual emissions would ever come close to RCP 8.5.
“It’s nuts,” he said. “But I used to think a lot of things were nuts that turned out not to be nuts.”

Links

• How to understand the UN’s dire new climate report
• No ecosystem on Earth is safe from climate change
• A Grave Climate Warning, Buried on Black Friday
• U.S. Carbon Pollution Surged in 2018, After Years of Stasis
• Young Workers Want Their Job to be More Than a Paycheck
• It's Not Just America: Climate Policies Are Stumbling Worldwide
• The Global Rightward Shift on Climate Change

Sydney Wins Bid To Host Major Climate Conference For Women In 2020

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

Hundreds of climate leaders are expected to flock to Sydney next year after the City of Sydney won its bid to host a global conference for women.
The C40 group, representing 94 cities home to more than 700 million people, has selected Sydney to host its Women4Climate Conference in April 2020.

Sydney Mayor Clover Moore has attended a range of international conferences, including the 2015 Paris climate summit. Credit: Peter Hannam

Lord Mayor Clover Moore said cities are responsible for a "staggering 75 to 80 per cent" of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, making action in cities to cut carbon pollution crucial.
“Many of the world’s biggest cities are setting ambitious targets and policies to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions, proving effective action on climate change and strong
economic growth are compatible," Cr Moore said.
“Shamefully, our own national government has a history of wilful negligence and Australian
politicians, both state and federal, are presiding over a climate disaster."
Polling, including by the Lowy Institute, suggest concern about climate change is at the highest level since the end of the Millennium Drought.
Those numbers may well rise after a summer of extremes, from mass fish kills on the Darling River, raging fires in Tasmania, extensive flooding in Queensland and record heat for Australia in December and January.
The Women4Climate aims to empower young female leaders to take action to protect the environment, with a focus on mentoring, research and technology.
Lord mayor Moore, City of Sydney chief executive Monica Barone and the mayor's chief of staff Shehana Teixeira will travel to Paris later this month to attend this year's Women4Climate Summit.
Sydney Council is expected to endorse the proposal to host next year's conference when it votes on the city's budget on February 11, with Cr Moore's Independent Team set to use its majority to support the plan.

Links

• Women4Climate
• C40 group
• 2019 Women4Climate Conference Paris
• Here’s a way to fight climate change: Empower women
• Women and climate change
• Climate change 'impacts women more than men'
• Women leaders come together to fight climate change
• Women, key players in the fight against climate change
• Climate Solutions Need Women at the Center

Climate Change A Burning Issue (Again) In Voters' Minds

The Guardian - Katharine Murphy

The Coalition has no choice but to try and fix the self-created disaster that is its climate policy

‘Climate change is not only a hot-button issue on its own terms. Some of the research suggests it has also become a proxy for political dysfunction.’ Photograph: Glenn Hunt/EPA 

This piece of backroom intelligence shouldn’t come as a surprise, given the summer we are all still enduring. Record high temperatures, the hottest January on record; storms; floods in some places, droughts in others; mass fish kills in ailing rivers.
Climate change is back as a vote-changing issue – top of mind for many Australian voters. Private polling conducted for the environment movement and for the major parties suggests community concern about climate change is currently sitting at levels not seen since the federal election cycle in 2007.
If you can remember the events of 2007, you’ll recall that John Howard was forced into a significant about-face on the issue. Within sight of the election that swept Kevin Rudd into power, Howard signed the Liberal party up to emissions trading, a “world’s best-practice” cap and trade scheme, and declared Australia must prepare for a “low-carbon future”.
The research doing the rounds as the major parties bed down their war rooms for the May contest puts climate change in the top-two issues of concern nationally. Women, particularly, are alarmed by the ongoing policy inaction, and that’s bad for the Liberals because the party’s standing among women is already depressed courtesy of the unhinged shenanigans of the past 12 months.
But there’s some nuance in the research. In marginal seats in outer suburban areas – the seats that often determine the outcome of federal elections – cost of living pressures still rank higher than climate change. But people insist that climate is registering in the top-three concerns in several outer suburban seats, where the issue is normally dormant.
The political consequence of all this is pretty obvious. The strength of community concern about climate change leaves the Morrison government vulnerable. The Coalition’s policy record on climate change is appalling. There is no other word for it. Absolutely, indefensibly, appalling.
The Liberals have opened the election year trying to put themselves back in contention. The government is desperately hoping that a full frontal, never mind the nuances, assault on Labor’s controversial tax measures is the pathway to a political fightback executed over the opening months of 2019.
During the summer the treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, has led a morale-boosting offensive on Labor’s negative gearing and dividend imputation policies on social media, with enthusiastic amplification from cooperative conservative media outlets hungry to sharpen their own “campaign journalism” spears, given the apparent likelihood of a Labor victory.
Frydenberg has endeared himself to colleagues for picking the tax fight. Nobody knows if all the thrashing about and train-crash gifs will resonate in the real world but two tangible things have been achieved.
Labor has been forced to defend its tax policies after a long period of dormancy in the debate, and the joust has delivered a shot of adrenalin to the moribund Liberal base. (As an aside, perhaps we can note that Frydenberg, with the frenzy of activity, might also be positioning himself for whatever fate awaits the Liberals post-election. Bit cheeky but doubtless true).
Coalition and Labor MPs report that the community backlash against dividend imputation is now a thing – a real and palpable thing rather than a febrile media confection – but Liberal and Labor MPs agree the anger is felt most keenly among Coalition supporters rather than people inclined to vote Labor.
Smart people on both sides of politics don’t yet know whether the government can leverage the current softening in the housing market to make negative gearing a point of serious political vulnerability for Labor or not. As they say in the classics, only time will tell.
While the tax fight has been good for internal morale, and may yet catch fire, smart people inside the government doubt it will be enough to turn negative sentiment, and believe it certainly won’t be enough if the government doesn’t try and fix its self-created disaster on climate change.
Internal discussions are under way about what to do. Moderates are sounding out what conservatives can live with.
An obvious course correction would be a cash injection for the emissions reduction fund, a vestige of the heavily criticised Direct Action scheme, and the environment minister has already flagged the ERF’s remit (which is currently paying for abatement) could be broadened to include the protection of threatened species.
Liberals who favour more climate action, and pronto, also point to the potential to increase funding for the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and Arena (the agencies the Coalition once campaigned to abolish), as well as providing handouts to households – a new package supporting the uptake of renewable energy.
But even if the Coalition manages to land some kind of repositioning without blowing the show sky-high (Hi Tony, happy new year), it’s unclear whether voters will buy it, given the gross stupidity of the past couple of terms, and given the Liberal party last year killed a prime minister in plain sight at least in part because he pursued a policy to reduce emissions in the electricity sector.
Also unclear is how any climate revamp would sit with the government’s aspiration to have taxpayers underwrite new coal-fired power plants, and potentially indemnify them against future carbon risk. Even if voters are forgiving enough to look past the policy car crash and the dumb and dumber intrigues that led to the third leadership change in two terms – that’s a split personality that’s hard to explain.
Climate change is not only a hot-button issue on its own terms. Some of the research suggests it has also become a proxy for political dysfunction, which is a lethal combination when voters are, as MPs report, viscerally angry at an incumbent government (although some Liberals will tell you Morrison isn’t loathed, according to their focus groups, and there’s some sentiment he should be given a chance).
At the moment, most of the political class is talking about Victoria. This is unusual. Normally before a federal election, a collective obsession descends about Queensland. “Whither Queensland?”. Why Queensland? Because the state has a swag of marginals.
Queensland remains front of mind, but Victoria is also turning up more often in dispatches. “Whither Victoria?” is on the agenda because of recent field evidence: the Liberals endured a rout in the state last year. Courtesy of that result, some in Labor think it’s possible Bill Shorten could take government with a southern states strategy, rather than embarking on the more typical mass genuflection to Queensland.
Not everyone buys that theory. Some think the anti-Liberal swing in the state contest won’t translate federally, for a couple of reasons.
The backlash in the Liberal heartland seen in last year’s state election was a cost-free protest vote. Liberals lost nothing by backing in Daniel Andrews, who had a concrete record to campaign on, and was a known quantity.
If Liberals vote for Bill Shorten, there will be a hip-pocket cost – the loss of negative gearing and capital gains concessions, cash rebates from dividend imputation – in other words, Labor’s policy offering federally puts a brake on the scale of the protest vote that might be lodged in May.
Liberals deeply depressed about the state of play in Victoria, and to a lesser degree in New South Wales, think Labor’s appetite to wind back tax concessions will be an automatic stabiliser on their heartland backlash to some degree – but they are conscious that a potent threat is coming from “small-l” liberal independents, which will require the diversion of scarce resources to supposedly safe seats.
Independents such as Zali Steggall and Oliver Yates are thumping the government on climate change, both as a thing in itself and as a proxy for dysfunction within the Liberal party which is imposing costs on the citizenry.
One live litmus test of whether Labor ultimately goes for broke with a southern states strategy – whether they think they can craft a pathway to victory without considering the parochial and materialist sensibilities of central Queenslanders – will be if Bill Shorten toughens Labor’s line on Adani. He went close to doing that last year but baulked at the last minute.
Environment groups and GetUp want Labor to stop the project, and they offer the party valuable campaign resources, strengthening an already formidable on-ground machine, in the event there can be a meeting of the minds.
Thus far Shorten hasn’t shifted and is remaining focused on hearts and minds in central Queensland, kicking off the election year campaigning in the state.
This suggests the Labor leader and the brains trust around him aren’t convinced – at least not currently – that writing off central Queensland is a political risk worth taking. But this is a space to watch.

Links

• January was Australia's hottest month since records began
• Josh Frydenberg defends Coalition's climate record as he faces challenge in Kooyong
• Queensland floods: emergency dam release as Townsville hit by 1.1 metre of rain 
• Murray-Darling basin royal commission report finds gross maladministration 
• Coalition could indemnify new coal projects against potential carbon price
• It's time to 'take out' environment ministers who fail on climate, says Oliver Yates
• 'The Right Time': Climate-Change Action The Rallying Cry For Emerging Independents
• Zali Steggall Promises Climate Change Fight With Tony Abbott In Warringah
• Vaccinate Public Against Science Misinformation, Researchers Urge
• Dead Stinking Fish Send A Message
• Dead Fish Could Stink Up The Election Campaign
• Cabinet Papers 1996-1997: How Australia Worked To Water Down Kyoto Climate Targets
• Stalling On Clean Energy Leaves Australia In The Dust
• Federal Government Must End Its ‘Climate Wars’, NSW Energy Minister Says

Huge Cavity In Antarctic Glacier Signals Rapid Decay

NASA - Carol Rasmussen

Thwaites Glacier. Credit: NASA/OIB/Jeremy Harbeck

A gigantic cavity - two-thirds the area of Manhattan and almost 1,000 feet (300 meters) tall - growing at the bottom of Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica is one of several disturbing discoveries reported in a new NASA-led study of the disintegrating glacier.
The findings highlight the need for detailed observations of Antarctic glaciers' undersides in calculating how fast global sea levels will rise in response to climate change.
Researchers expected to find some gaps between ice and bedrock at Thwaites' bottom where ocean water could flow in and melt the glacier from below.
The size and explosive growth rate of the newfound hole, however, surprised them. It's big enough to have contained 14 billion tons of ice, and most of that ice melted over the last three years.
"We have suspected for years that Thwaites was not tightly attached to the bedrock beneath it," said Eric Rignot of the University of California, Irvine, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Rignot is a co-author of the new study, which was published today in Science Advances. "Thanks to a new generation of satellites, we can finally see the detail," he said.
The cavity was revealed by ice-penetrating radar in NASA's Operation IceBridge, an airborne campaign beginning in 2010 that studies connections between the polar regions and the global climate. The researchers also used data from a constellation of Italian and German spaceborne synthetic aperture radars. These very high-resolution data can be processed by a technique called radar interferometry to reveal how the ground surface below has moved between images.
"[The size of] a cavity under a glacier plays an important role in melting," said the study's lead author, Pietro Milillo of JPL. "As more heat and water get under the glacier, it melts faster."
Numerical models of ice sheets use a fixed shape to represent a cavity under the ice, rather than allowing the cavity to change and grow. The new discovery implies that this limitation most likely causes those models to underestimate how fast Thwaites is losing ice.
About the size of Florida, Thwaites Glacier is currently responsible for approximately 4 percent of global sea level rise. It holds enough ice to raise the world ocean a little over 2 feet (65 centimeters) and backstops neighboring glaciers that would raise sea levels an additional 8 feet (2.4 meters) if all the ice were lost.
Thwaites is one of the hardest places to reach on Earth, but it is about to become better known than ever before. The U.S. National Science Foundation and British National Environmental Research Council are mounting a five-year field project to answer the most critical questions about its processes and features. The International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration will begin its field experiments in the Southern Hemisphere summer of 2019-20.

Ice thickness change of Thwaites Glacier: (A) Ice surface elevation from Airborne Topographic Mapper and ice bottom from MCoRDS radar depth sounder in 2011, 2014, and 2016, colour-coded green, blue, and brown, respectively, along profiles T1-T2 and (B) T3-T4 with bed elevation (brown) from (16). Grounding line positions deduced from the MCoRDS data are marked with arrows, with the same colour coding. (C) Change in TDX ice surface elevation, h, from June 2011 to 2017, with 50-m contour line in bed elevation and tick marks every 1km. Source: Science Advances

How scientists measure ice loss
There's no way to monitor Antarctic glaciers from ground level over the long term. Instead, scientists use satellite or airborne instrument data to observe features that change as a glacier melts, such as its flow speed and surface height.
Another changing feature is a glacier's grounding line - the place near the edge of the continent where it lifts off its bed and starts to float on seawater. Many Antarctic glaciers extend for miles beyond their grounding lines, floating out over the open ocean.
Just as a grounded boat can float again when the weight of its cargo is removed, a glacier that loses ice weight can float over land where it used to stick. When this happens, the grounding line retreats inland. That exposes more of a glacier's underside to sea water, increasing the likelihood its melt rate will accelerate.

An irregular retreat
For Thwaites, "We are discovering different mechanisms of retreat," Millilo said. Different processes at various parts of the 100-mile-long (160-kilometer-long) front of the glacier are putting the rates of grounding-line retreat and of ice loss out of sync.
The huge cavity is under the main trunk of the glacier on its western side - the side farther from the West Antarctic Peninsula. In this region, as the tide rises and falls, the grounding line retreats and advances across a zone of about 2 to 3 miles (3 to 5 kilometers). The glacier has been coming unstuck from a ridge in the bedrock at a steady rate of about 0.4 to 0.5 miles (0.6 to 0.8 kilometers) a year since 1992. Despite this stable rate of grounding-line retreat, the melt rate on this side of the glacier is extremely high.
"On the eastern side of the glacier, the grounding-line retreat proceeds through small channels, maybe a kilometer wide, like fingers reaching beneath the glacier to melt it from below," Milillo said. In that region, the rate of grounding-line retreat doubled from about 0.4 miles (0.6 kilometers) a year from 1992 to 2011 to 0.8 miles (1.2 kilometers) a year from 2011 to 2017. Even with this accelerating retreat, however, melt rates on this side of the glacier are lower than on the western side.
These results highlight that ice-ocean interactions are more complex than previously understood.
Milillo hopes the new results will be useful for the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration researchers as they prepare for their fieldwork. "Such data is essential for field parties to focus on areas where the action is, because the grounding line is retreating rapidly with complex spatial patterns," he said.
"Understanding the details of how the ocean melts away this glacier is essential to project its impact on sea level rise in the coming decades," Rignot said.
The paper by Milillo and his co-authors in the journal Science Advances is titled "Heterogeneous retreat and ice melt of Thwaites Glacier, West Antarctica." Co-authors were from the University of California, Irvine; the German Aerospace Center in Munich, Germany; and the University Grenoble Alpes in Grenoble, France.

Links

• Thwaites Glacier has an enormous cavity beneath it, melted by warm ocean waters
• Huge cavity in Antarctic glacier signals rapid decay
• NASA Discovers a ‘Disturbing’ 1,000-Foot-Tall Cavity Under a Glacier in Antarctica
• 'Terrifying': Scientists Dig Deep For Missing Piece Of Climate Puzzle
• Ice Loss From Antarctica Has Sextupled Since The 1970s, New Research Finds
• An Ocean Of Evidence On Warming Is Our Cue To Take Action - Now
• Discovery Of Recent Antarctic Ice Sheet Collapse Raises Fears Of A New Global Flood
• Ancient Antarctic Ice Sheet Collapse Could Happen Again, Triggering A New Global Flood
• Outgoing Australian Antarctic Division Boss Sounds Climate Change Warning
• Exclusive Photos: A Giant Iceberg Breaks Off Antarctica

U.S. Intelligence Officials Warn Climate Change Is A Worldwide Threat

InsideCimate News - Neela Banerjee

Their annual assessment says climate hazards such as extreme weather, droughts, floods, wildfires and sea level rise threaten infrastructure, health and security.

National Intelligence Director Dan Coats and directors of the FBI, CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency testify on the Worldwide Threat Assessment before a Senate committee. Credit: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty

The nation's intelligence community warned in its annual assessment of worldwide threats that climate change and other kinds of environmental degradation pose risks to global stability because they are "likely to fuel competition for resources, economic distress, and social discontent through 2019 and beyond."
Released Tuesday, the Worldwide Threat Assessment prepared by the Director of National Intelligence added to a swelling chorus of scientific and national security voices in pointing out the ways climate change fuels widespread insecurity and erodes America's ability to respond to it.
"Climate hazards such as extreme weather, higher temperatures, droughts, floods, wildfires, storms, sea level rise, soil degradation, and acidifying oceans are intensifying, threatening infrastructure, health, and water and food security," said the report, which represents the consensus view among top intelligence officials. "Irreversible damage to ecosystems and habitats will undermine the economic benefits they provide, worsened by air, soil, water, and marine pollution."
In just the past two weeks, the Pentagon sent a report to Congress describing extreme weather and climate risks to dozens of critical military installations. (House leaders on Wednesday asked for more details, including an assessment of the 10 bases in each service most vulnerable to climate change.) The Government Accountability Office also recommended the State Department resume providing guidance to U.S. diplomats about climate change and migration. Last week, a scientific paper concluded that drought driven by climate change and the subsequent fights over water resources increased the likelihood of armed conflict in the Middle East from 2011–2015, which in turn triggered waves refugees.
The United Nations Security Council also held a discussion on Friday devoted to understanding and responding to how climate change acts as a "threat multiplier" in countries where governance is already fragile and resources are sparse.
Robert Mardini, the permanent observer to the UN from the International Committee of the Red Cross, said his group's fieldwork confirms the "double impact" of climate change and war.
"Climate change exacerbates vulnerabilities and inequalities, especially in situations of armed conflict, where countries, communities and populations are the least prepared and the least able to protect themselves and adapt," Mardini told the Security Council, according to his published remarks. "Conflicts harm the structures and systems that are necessary to facilitate adaptation to climate change."

In Contrast with the U.S. President
The formal threat assessment is also the latest federal survey of climate change to clash with President Donald Trump's adamant denial of the established consensus. In late November, the administration issued the Fourth National Climate Assessment, based on the work of 300 scientists and 13 federal agencies, which concluded that climate change threatened human life, ecosystems and the American economy. Trump dismissed the report, saying he did not believe its central findings.
Trump has pushed the message of climate denial through federal agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, mainly by working to halt rules and research to address climate change. But so far, the White House has not reined in the national security community when its leaders have acknowledged climate change or its agencies have explored its implications.
Further, members of Congress from both parties have provided the Pentagon, at least, with cover, instructing it in late 2017 to analyze the threats climate change poses to American military readiness.

Regions to Watch for Climate-Related Risks
The 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment echoes the findings of versions from previous years that highlight climate change as a threat to what's called "human security" in a list that includes terrorism, cyber crimes and weapons of mass destruction. Among the situations and places it cites as being of particular concern are:

• Urban coastal areas of South Asia, Southeast Asia and the Western Hemisphere that could be battered by extreme weather and aggravated by rising sea levels. It says "damage to communication, energy, and transportation infrastructure could affect low-lying military bases, inflict economic costs, and cause human displacement and loss of life." (Last year, Hurricane Michael inflicted an estimated $5 billion in damage on Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida.)
• Countries such as Egypt, Ethiopia, Jordan and Iraq, which are at increasing risk of social unrest and cross-border tension because "changes in the frequency and variability of heat waves, droughts, and floods—combined with poor governance practices—are increasing water and food insecurity."
• The Arctic, where receding sea ice "may increase competition—particularly with Russia and China— over access to sea routes and natural resources."

Links

• Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community (pdf)
• Climate Change As A Matter Of International Security
• Climate, conflict and forced migration (pdf)
• Climate change recognized as ‘threat multiplier’, UN Security Council debates its impact on peace
• The Threat That the US Can't Ignore: Itself

Extreme Weather Events Are Fueling ‘Food Shocks’ And Jeopardizing Global Security

ThinkProgress - E.A. Crunden

Climate change is driving more severe weather, which in turn is threatening food.

California vineyards post-wildfire. CREDIT: George Rose/Getty Images

Extreme weather is imperiling food security across the globe with greater frequency, according to new research released Monday highlighting the impact of worsening weather disasters on global markets and food systems.
A study by researchers at the University of Tasmania published January 28 in the journal Nature Sustainability found that food production is becoming increasingly susceptible to climate and weather volatility.
These “food shocks” — or, sudden losses to food production — are hitting local communities hard, in addition to impacting the global economy, with long-term implications.
“Critically, shock frequency has increased through time on land and sea at a global scale,” the study notes. “Geopolitical and extreme-weather events were the main shock drivers identified, but with considerable differences across sectors.”
Weather events including floods, droughts, hurricanes, and other shocks have taken a toll on agriculture and growing systems. Across 134 nations over a 53-year period from 1961 to 2013, researchers identified 226 food production shocks across all sectors, including crops, livestock, fisheries, and aquaculture.
Using data from marine and inland fisheries, crop and livestock production records, and other resources, the study’s authors pinpointed alarming trends over the course of the last half century.
In analyzing that time period, researchers found that shocks happened more frequently as time went on. Upticks were noted between the 1960s and 1970s, as well as during other periods, including between 2000 and 2010, in line with both weather events and major national crises that occurred at the time.
When any food sector is impacted, people risk going hungry, in addition to farmers and other food producers losing their livelihoods. That can create catastrophic unrest rippling across countries and regions, and, eventually, the world.

Fig.2 Drivers of food production shocks. Relative proportions for the drivers indicated in the legend are shown for the crop, livestock, fisheries and aquaculture sectors. Credit: Nature Sustainability

“A wide range of social and ecological pressures on food systems can drive shocks through direct or indirect mechanisms,” the study states. It goes on to note that “People’s vulnerability to shock events rests on their capacity to adapt, the scale and frequency of shocks, and their dependence on the affected sector.”
Strengthening resilience against food shocks is a key point of concern for the study’s authors, who emphasize urgency. Warming temperatures and a changing climate have come hand-in-hand with an uptick in the weather crises that cause food shocks.
“Increased investment in food systems research to improve resilience to shocks is urgently required under climate change,” the study warns. Resilience can include a number of shifts, including diversifying food sources, creating new climate-conscious infrastructure, and bolstering domestic food sources for areas dependent on international trade.
Not all regions have been impacted equally. South Asia, for example, is already among the regions most at risk, with floods and heat waves becoming more common across countries like India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. Food shocks hitting crops were most common in that region, while Eastern Europe has seen major blows to its fisheries and South America’s aquaculture has suffered.
And while weather events take up much of the report, the impact of geopolitical events is also noted as a driver of food shocks, with the fall of communism in Soviet Russia and a series of wars in Afghanistan among the examples. Those two factors — weather and political crises — have combined to throw off food production, and, in turn, threaten people around the world.
“In recent decades we have become increasingly familiar with images in the media of disasters such as drought and famine around the world,” said lead author Richard Cottrell in a press release. “Our study confirms that food production shocks have become more frequent, posing a growing danger to global food production.”

Fig.4 Case studies of shock spillover, trade-offs and co-occurrence across terrestrial and aquatic sectors. a. Invasion of Kuwait during the Gulf War. b. Severe drought in Afghanistan. c. Land-sea switches following Hurricane David in Dominica. d. El Niño-driven floods on land followed by an outbreak of white-spot disease in shrimp farms in Ecuador. ENSO, El Niño Southern Oscillation. Credit: Nature Sustainability

The study comes after a brutal year that saw wildfires, hurricanes, floods, and other disasters play out across the world. In 2018, more than 100 people died in Greece amid raging wildfires, while heat waves devastated India and Pakistan. Flooding in Nigeria and Japan killed more than 400 people and the combination of two earthquakes and a tsunami left over 3,000 people dead in Indonesia.
In the United States, impacts also took a heavy toll. Wildfires in the West killed more than 100 people and cost California more than $3.5 billion in damages. And for the second year in a row, hurricanes pulverized the Gulf and East Coasts, drenching North Carolina in a record-shattering amount of rain and wreaking havoc in Florida and other states.
While no single event can be easily connected to climate change, scientists have consistently drawn connections between global warming and increasingly erratic, and more intense weather patterns. Drier and hotter temperatures are fueling more deadly fires in areas where wildfires are common, while warmer-than-average waters in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere are allowing hurricanes to become more damaging.
As those climate impacts worsen, Monday’s study indicates food production will continue to suffer as well. Wildfires and hurricanes alike destroy crops and set back growing seasons, in addition to harming the infrastructure used for future efforts. Preparing for that inevitability will be critical to mitigating such impacts.
“With extreme weather events predicted to increase into the future, potentially interacting with civil unrest, achieving food security in regions most exposed to shocks may hinge on successful social protection mechanisms to help people cope and recover,” the study warns.
“Fundamental shifts towards shock-resilient food systems will require considerable but achievable changes to how we grow and trade food.”

Links

• Food production shocks across land and sea (pdf)
• Climate change will hit the most vulnerable first and hardest, major new government report finds
• Australia’s Drought, Climate Change And The Future Of Food
• African Islands Call For Help As Climate Change Worsens Health
• Redrawing The Map: How The World’s Climate Zones Are Shifting
• Rising CO2 Levels Could Push ‘Hundreds Of Millions’ Into Malnutrition By 2050
• This Graphic Explains Why 2 Degrees Of Global Warming Will Be Way Worse Than 1.5
• Climate Change May Soon Hit Billions Of People. Many Cities Are Already Taking Action.
• Conflict, Climate Change Choke Efforts To Cure Poverty, Inequality: U.N.
• Climate Change Strips Nutrients From Food Crops