Climate Change is a crime against humanity! #auspol #science

Yes, I am a climate alarmist. Global warming is a crime against humanity | Lawrence Torcello
Most of us have wondered about the human context of past crimes against humanity: why didn’t more people intervene? 

How could so many pretend not to know? 

To be sure, crimes against humanity are not always easy to identify while they unfold.
We need some time to reflect and to analyze, even when our reasoning suggests that large scale human suffering and death are likely imminent.

 The principled condemnation of large scale atrocity is, too often, a luxury of hindsight.
I’m a climate alarmist because there is no morally responsible way to downplay the dangers that negligent policies – expected to accelerate human-caused climate change – pose to humankind.

There can be no greater crime against humanity than the foreseeable, and methodical, destruction of conditions that make human life possible – hindsight isn’t necessary.
Scientists confirm, in overwhelming consensus, the fundamental facts that make anthropogenic global warming a clear and present threat to humanity and other species.
There is no amount of ideological deception capable of altering basic physics, chemistry and biology. It is ethically untenable for intelligent people to look the other way while elected officials deny reality, and our opportunity to avoid catastrophe slips away.
We know that the continued acceleration of climate change will bring more droughts, rising seas, more extreme weather, longer forest fire seasons and destructive storm surges. This in turn would lead to more water stress, crop failures, poverty, starvation, warfare and ever worsening refugee crises.

We know that the warming already achieved is expected to displace millions of people in low lying regions. Indeed, at our current rate of warming segments of the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia, will likely become uninhabitable for future generations.
This is not a problem for the distant future. People reading this right risk dying of impacts related to climate change. Anyone who claims global warming is not catastrophic is ill informed – or playing a disingenuous game of privilege. Such a person is probably white, male, living in an affluent nation, politically conservative, and of a relatively wealthy demographic.
It is a fact that those least responsible for global warming, the global poor living in the global south, are most immediately vulnerable to climate change. This reality carries profound moral implications. Whole island nations in the southern hemisphere, such as the South Pacific’s Kiribati, Tuvalu, the Marshall Islands, and the Indian Ocean’s Maldives, are under threat from rising seas.
Citizens of these and other low-lying regions will be, or are already being, forced to assimilate to other lands. When indigenous populations are displaced and subjected to forced assimilation by outsiders exploiting resources for their own profit it constitutes a form of cultural genocide—and history teaches that the large scale displacement of cultural groups can raise the risk of physical genocide.
Consequently, if any nation were to enact policies calculated to systematically destroy cultural lands and displace native people, as climate change will, it would rightly raise international debates over genocide. It makes no difference to populations forced off their homelands whether the resource exploitation responsible is occurring in West Virginia or Papua New Guinea.
The moral, and existential, implications of human-caused climate change should by now have triggered full-scale, World War II style effort to end fossil fuel dependence and associated greenhouse gas emissions.
The global community ought to have engaged in a renewable energy “arms race” years ago. Instead, we burn away time while fossil fuel interests fund negligent campaigns of disinformation and politicians stage fake debates over the science of climate change.
Despite efforts to poison public discourse the world agreed to a plan, in 2015, which might give humanity a fighting chance to avoid catastrophic climate change.
To undo this progress now, while time is running out and physics is managing the clock, is to risk sentencing countless people to death via extreme weather, depleted resources, and associated political instability. We know the human consequences of our policies and the casual acceptance of those consequences incriminate us morally.
Pulling out of the Paris accord is not the only way that President Donald J Trump’s administration can undermine our attempts to address climate change: The United States can simply make it clear that it won’t honor its political and ethical obligations under the Paris agreement.

It is hard to imagine a clearer way to signal that message than proposing to cut research funding for climate science, gutting the climate change programs of the EPA, NASA, and NOAA, halting payments to the United Nations related to climate change, backing construction of the controversial Dakota Access and Keystone XL Pipelines, and issuing an executive order undoing the United States’ clean power plan, which restricts greenhouse gas emissions at coal fired-plants.
The climate policies of the Trump administration, backed by many Republican leaders, are rooted in culpable ignorance and transparent corruption. And they place us all at risk on a scale that previous crimes against humanity never have.
Civility and fair mindedness do not require hospitality to policies that hasten the destruction of a livable planet. We don’t depend on hindsight to recognize the moral gravity of our current situation.
We will search in vain for a better reason to depose elected officials. Every legal resource to remove such leaders is justified. We can’t pretend we don’t know the nature of what is unfolding. We are witnessing a crime against humanity – and the potential prelude to future genocide.
We are the bystanders who must choose to intervene or be defined by our failure.
Lawrence Torcello is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology in the United States. He specializes in moral and political philosophy.

Press link for more: The Guardian

Cities Brace For Climate Challenges #auspol #climatechange

Cities brace for climate challenges
Scientists say flooding is a growing risk for cities, with Paris due for its next one-in-a-hundred-years flood

Vienna (AFP) – Faced with exploding populations and steadily rising temperatures worldwide, cities must make haste in reinforcing defences against climate change-induced flooding and heat waves, experts warned this week.
City temperatures are forecast to shoot up in the coming years, exposing inhabitants to killer heat spikes, while rising sea levels and river flooding threaten homes, drinking water, and transport and electricity infrastructure.
Cities are vulnerable to a unique risk called the “urban heat island” (UHI) effect — their concrete surfaces retain more of the sun’s heat than undeveloped areas, scientists explained at a meeting of the European Geosciences Union (EGU) in Vienna.
By midcentury, if planet-warming fossil fuel emissions continue unabated, city temperatures in Belgium could exceed today’s heat-alert levels by as much as 10 degrees Celsius (18 degrees Fahrenheit) for 25 days each summer, according to one research paper.
Another study showed that heat waves will become a frequent challenge for European cities — more numerous in the south of the continent, more intense in the north.
And floods, a major risk to Europe’s dense urban settlements, will become more common because of an increase in freak rainstorms, as well as sea-level increases caused by polar ice melt and warmer ocean water expanding.
In flood-prone southeast Asia, precipitation is set to increase by 20 percent this century, one researcher said in Vienna.

Recent flooding in Jakarta , Indonesia

The stakes are especially high given the projections for expansion of urban areas, which are often ill equipped to deal with nature’s vengeance.
– High stakes –
Already, more than half the world’s population live in cities.
By 2050, 80 percent of people in rich nations, and 60 percent in developing states, will be concentrated in built-up areas, according to recent calculations.
This corresponds to the appearance of a settlement of a million inhabitants somewhere on the globe every week for the next 40 years.
Occupying only a small portion of Earth’s available land, cities are responsible for 80 percent of all energy consumed and generate over 60 percent of the planet-warming greenhouse gases emitted when humans burn fossil fuel for heating, power and transportation.
In spite of efforts to curb emissions, the planet has already warmed about one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) on average from pre-Industrial Revolution levels.
Many scientists say the planet may be on track for three degrees Celsius of warming or more, exceeding the two-degree cap politicians set in Paris in 2015.
This means cities must act now to shore up their defences against impacts that can no longer be avoided, French climatologist Herve le Treut warned at the annual EGU gathering.
“It’s already happening,” Le Treut said of climate change impacts. “We have to start structural action quickly: transportation, houses… mainly in the cities, especially in vulnerable places.”
Most of the infrastructure constructed by humanity is un urban zones.
“The ways cities are built is not optimal” for today’s climate reality, said Daniel Schertzer, a hydrometeorologist at the engineering school Ecole des Ponts ParisTech.
“Historically, humans have settled near water, thinking of its usefulness, but not of the risk! Cities were conceived without taking geophysics into consideration, now they are discovering that nature is complicated, not just good,” he told AFP on the sidelines of the conference.
Paris, for example, is due for its next so-called one-in-a hundred-year flood.
– ‘It will occur’ –
The last major Paris flood, in 1910, saw the Seine river rise 8.62 metres (28.3 feet), shutting down much of the City of Light’s basic infrastructure.
“It… will occur some day,” said Sebastien Maire, who goes by the title of Paris’s chief resilience officer.
And when it does, research shows it will cost about 100 billion euros ($109 billion) and some 400,000 jobs, and harm France’s economic output for five years afterwards.
A flood of this level would damage the underground metro system to such an extent that “it will take five to 10 years to rebuild,” Maire said.
Paris is vulnerable because much of its critical infrastructure lies near the Seine — including power distribution, heating, telecommunications and fresh water networks.
Maire is part of 100 Resilient Cities, a think-tank created to help city planners prepare for natural shocks such as hurricanes, earthquakes, fires and floods.
Thinking globally about urban exposure to climate change and extreme weather is a relatively new field, and presents a unique opportunity to “incorporate resilient design,” Maire said.
Half the city infrastructure that will be in place by 2070 has not yet been built, he pointed out.
“We’ve asked researchers to help us,” Maire said. “Cities need the science to work on this.”
One solution mooted at the conference was “greening” cities via balcony and rooftop gardens to counter the effects of “urban heat islands” — since plants absorb heat.

Singapore Garden City
Another proposed taking lessons from tradition.
Uchimizu, a technique used in 17th-century Japan to gather rainwater and sprinkle it on the ground, “considerably” reduced surface-level temperatures in an experiment conducted at Delft University in the Netherlands.
“It’s something anyone can do,” researcher Anna Solverova said.

Press link for more: Yahoo.com

Half Of All Species Are On The Move. Nature reacts to #climatechange #auspol

Half of All Species Are on the Move—And We’re Feeling It
A recent federal study found that spring is arriving as many as 20 days early in the southwestern United States—and even as far north as the New York Botanical Garden, where this tree blooms.

The shrubs probably responded first. In the 19th century, alder and flowering willows in the Alaskan Arctic stood no taller than a small child—just a little over three feet. 

But as temperatures warmed with fossil fuel emissions, and growing seasons lengthened, the shrubs multiplied and prospered. Today many stand over six feet.
Bigger shrubs drew moose, which rarely crossed the Brooks Range before the 20th century. Now these spindly-legged beasts lumber along Arctic river corridors, wherever the vegetation is tall enough to poke through the deep snow. They were followed by snowshoe hares, which also browse on shrubs.
Today moose and hares have become part of the subsistence diet for indigenous hunters in northern Alaska, as melting sea ice makes traditional foods like seals harder to chase.
That’s just one of thousands of ways in which human-caused climate change is altering life  for plants and animals, and in the process having direct and sometimes profound impacts on humans. 

As the planet warms, species are shifting where, when, and how they thrive. 

They are moving up slopes and toward the poles. 

That is already altering what people can eat; sparking new disease risks; upending key industries; and changing how entire cultures use the land and sea.
“We’re talking about a redistribution of the entire planet’s species,” says Gretta Pecl, lead author of a new study in Science that examined the implications of wildlife on the move.
As the Atlantic warms, mackerel have spread north, creating a new fishery off Iceland.

Germs and Pests on the March

The changes already are quite dramatic. 

Malaria, for example, now appears higher up mountain slopes in Colombia and Ethiopia, as rising thermostats make way for mosquitoes at higher elevations. 

Leishmaniasis, a sometimes-fatal, once primarily tropical affliction, has moved into northern Texas as the sandflies that host the disease-causing parasite head north.
Agriculture is feeling the effects too, as crop pests expand their range. 

Diamondback moths, which ravage the cabbages, kale, and cauliflower grown by poor urban farmers, are spreading in South Africa. 

In Latin America, coffee plant funguses and pests are appearing in new areas, threatening a key industry. The same is happening to French olives, wine grapes, and lavender. 

And in the United States, scientists suspect climate change has promoted the increasingly rapid spread of Johnson grass, a highly invasive weed that reduces yields for legumes, corn, sorghum, and soybean.
Some people are benefiting: Atlantic mackerel have moved so far north that the Icelandic fleet, which once caught the fish only by accident, now shares a major industry with Europe. 

The point is that the effects of climate change on wildlife, for good or (mostly) for ill, are already significant.
“The biological data is incredibly striking, but we haven’t really gotten the story out,” Pecl says. “We’re undergoing the greatest change to our environmental systems that the world has seen in millions of years. 

And it’s affecting people.”

A caribou in Alaska’s Denali National Park.

 In Greenland, climate change has increased caribou mortality, because the abundance of forage plants now peaks before the animals arrive on their summer breeding grounds.
Half of All Life Is Moving

Scientists have long assumed that species would shift their range as climate conditions shift. 

They just didn’t expect it would happen so fast.
A tally of more than 4,000 species from around the world shows that roughly half are on the move. 

The ones on land are moving an average of more than 10 miles per decade, while marine species are moving four times faster. 

Some individual species are moving far more quickly. 

Atlantic cod and Europe’s purple emperor butterfly, according to Camille Parmesan, a scientist at Plymouth University in the United Kingdom, moved more than 125 miles in a single decade.
Warming is also shifting the timing of biological cycles. 

Globally, frogs and other amphibians are breeding an average of eight days earlier with each passing decade, while birds and butterflies are reproducing four days earlier.

 By revisiting records kept by Walden author Henry David Thoreau, scientists showed that plants of all kinds in Concord, Massachusetts, now flower about 18 days earlier than they did in the 1850s.
“Everywhere throughout the world, things are happening earlier in the spring—in China, Japan, Korea, across Europe—those are the strongest signals of all,” says Richard Primack, a biology professor at Boston University.

 “The time that trees and shrubs leaf out in spring determines the entire timing of the growing season. It can completely change the whole ecology of the forest.”
Where the change will end up isn’t easy to predict; as the species within an ecosystem shift in space and time, they’re not all shifting at the same pace, and they’re not all responding to the same signals. 

Some are adapting to temperature changes, others are more influenced by sunlight or changes in precipitation. In California, some mountain plants, such as hemlock, are actually moving downhill, toward warmer temperatures, as climate shifts bring more precipitation to once dry valleys. 

In one Colorado region, wildflower blooms now last a month longer, because flowers no longer bloom all at once.
And all over the world, new hybrid species are appearing—toads, sharks, butterflies, bears, trout, are among the examples that have been documented so far. The hybrid result from interbreeding of species that have been newly thrown together by climate change.
Other species are threatened by the unraveling of ecological relationships. Take for example the red knot, a shorebird that migrates from the tropics to the Arctic each spring to breed and feed on insects. Because Arctic snows are now melting and insects are hatching weeks before the birds arrive, there’s too little food for the red knot chicks—and at least in the case of the population that migrates back to West Africa, the young birds’ beaks are too small to pluck mollusks from sandy beaches.
Similarly, in West Greenland, the mortality of young caribou is rising because the plants that mothers eat in calving season are no longer abundant enough. In Japan, the herb Cordyalis ambigua is now flowering before bumblebees emerge to pollinate it, and as a result it’s producing fewer seeds. Meanwhile, bumblebees globally are being pushed out of the southern part of their range by rising temperatures, and for whatever reason are not expanding their range much in the north.
“Anybody who spends time outside as a bird watcher or fisherman or hunter knows that timing and migrations are changing,” says David Inouye, emeritus professor with the University of Maryland, College Park, who has worked in the Rocky Mountains for decades. “I think what might be more novel is the fact that whole communities are being affected.”
Increasingly, these species shifts are starting to impact people, especially in the far north, in ways no one predicted.
No Songs About the Sable

Tero Mustonen, who works with the Finnish group Snowchange Cooperative, has heard a curious complaint from indigenous leaders in Siberia: “There are no songs about the sable, there are no old stories about the sable,” they tell him. Sables are woodland creatures that didn’t used to inhabit the Arctic tundra. In and of itself, their recent arrival may not pose a great challenge—but it symbolizes, Mustonen explains, the extent to which Arctic landscapes are no longer fully recognizable to the indigenous peoples who have lived there for centuries. In Sweden there’s a lake that has forever been known as The Lake of Pine Trees; it’s now surrounded by birch.
Some of the shifts, of course, pose greater challenges. Thawing permafrost is causing lakes that nomadic Siberians used to fish in, and to water their reindeer in, to vanish into the ground. In Sweden, lakes and streams previously used for drinking water are now contaminated with the parasite that causes giardia, the human intestinal illness. Beavers following willow trees north probably spread the parasite, says Maria Furberg, a research scientist who is tracking disease outbreaks in the far north.
The incidence of insect-borne tularemia, also known as rabbit fever, has grown 10-fold in northern Sweden in 30 years, Furberg reports. Just last month scientists announced a 23-fold increase in tick-borne encephalitis in the Komi Republic, west of Russia’s Ural Mountains. Climate change, they said, has allowed ticks to expand their range.
All these changes are sparking unease among Siberians and Scandinavians in particular, Mustonen says. “Nature doesn’t trust us anymore,” some elders have told him.

Press link for more: National Geographic

Climate change has been underestimated. #auspol #science

Science has underestimated Earth’s sensitivity to CO2 changes, study finds
By Jim Shelton

April 7, 2016

Global warming

A Yale University study says global climate models have significantly underestimated how much the Earth’s surface temperature will rise if greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase as expected.

Yale scientists looked at a number of global climate projections and found that they misjudged the ratio of ice crystals and super-cooled water droplets in “mixed-phase” clouds — resulting in a significant under-reporting of climate sensitivity. The findings appear April 7 in the journal Science.
Equilibrium climate sensitivity is a measure used to estimate how Earth’s surface temperature ultimately responds to changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2). Specifically, it reflects how much the Earth’s average surface temperature would rise if CO2 doubled its preindustrial level. In 2013, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimated climate sensitivity to be within a range of 2 to 4.7 degrees Celsius.
The Yale team’s estimate is much higher: between 5 and 5.3 degrees Celsius. Such an increase could have dramatic implications for climate change worldwide, note the scientists.
“It goes to everything from sea level rise to more frequent and extreme droughts and floods,” said Ivy Tan, a Yale graduate student and lead author of the study.
Trude Storelvmo, a Yale assistant professor of geology and geophysics, led the research and is a co-author of the study. The other co-author is Mark Zelinka of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison.

A key part of the research has to do with the makeup of mixed-phase clouds, which consist of water vapor, liquid droplets, and ice particles, in the upper atmosphere. A larger amount of ice in those clouds leads to a lower climate sensitivity — something known as a negative climate feedback mechanism. The more ice you have in the upper atmosphere, the less warming there will be on the Earth’s surface.
“We saw that all of the models started with far too much ice,” said Storelvmo, an assistant professor of geology and geophysics. “When we ran our own simulations, which were designed to better match what we found in satellite observations, we came up with more warming.”
Storelvmo’s lab at Yale has spent several years studying climate feedback mechanisms associated with clouds. Little has been known about such mechanisms until fairly recently, she explained, which is why earlier models were not more precise.
“The overestimate of ice in mixed-phase clouds relative to the observations is something that many climate modelers are starting to realize,” Tan said.
The researchers also stressed that correcting the ice-water ratio in global models is critical, leading up to the IPCC’s next assessment report, expected in 2020.
Support for the research came from the NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship Program, the National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Energy.

Press link for more: Yale.edu

Bloomberg calls “bullshit” on clean coal #auspol

Michael Bloomberg an outspoken environmentalist and former New York City mayor, had some harsh words for carbon capture and storage, the unproven technology that proponents say will turn fossil fuels into “clean” energy sources.
“Carbon capture is total bullshit” and “a figment of the imagination,” Bloomberg said on Monday, addressing a crowd at the Bloomberg New Energy Finance summit in New York.
Carbon capture involves taking the emissions from coal and natural gas-burning power plants and industrial facilities, then burying the carbon deep underground or repurposing it for fertilizers and chemicals. The idea is that by trapping emissions before they enter the atmosphere, we can limit their contribution to human-caused climate change.
Climate experts say it will be next to impossible to eliminate the world’s emissions without carbon capture systems. The International Energy Agency has called the technology “essential,” given that countries are likely to keep burning coal, oil, and natural gas for decades to come.
 Michael Bloomberg, billionaire, former NYC mayor, prominent environmentalist and major coal critic.

Michael Bloomberg, billionaire, former NYC mayor, prominent environmentalist and major coal critic.
Image: joe raedle/Getty Images
But to Bloomberg and other critics, that’s precisely the problem. By investing billions of dollars into carbon capture, countries can effectively delay the inevitable — the end of fossil fuels — and postpone investments in genuinely cleaner energy, such as wind and solar power.
So far, only a handful of carbon capture projects even exist around the world, and many of them have faced steep cost overruns and delays. The Kemper Project in Mississippi — billed as America’s “flagship” carbon capture project — is more than $4 billion over budget and still not operational.
Yet President Donald Trump and many coal industry leaders talk about carbon capture as if it’s already solved the nation’s energy challenges. If we have “clean coal,” why invest in alternatives?
Bloomberg has also used aggressive language to express disdain for the coal industry.
“I don’t have much sympathy for industries whose products leave behind a trail of diseased and dead bodies,” he wrote in his new book, Climate of Hope, which he co-authored with former Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope.
“But for everyone’s sake, we should aim to put them out of business,” Bloomberg said.

 Scott Pruitt, head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, speaks with coal miners in Pennsylvania.
Scott Pruitt, head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, speaks with coal miners in Pennsylvania.
Image: ustin Merriman/Getty Images
The billionaire media mogul has donated some $80 million to the Sierra Club to help the environmental group shut down coal-fired power plants as part of its Beyond Coal campaign.
More than 250 U.S. coal plants have shut down or committed to retire since the campaign began in 2011. Many of those closures came as natural gas prices plummeted, prompting utilities to ditch coal, and as federal clean air and water rules made it too costly to upgrade aging coal plants.
Of the nation’s more than 500 coal plants, only 273 now remain open, and Bloomberg’s philanthropy arm and the Sierra Club are working to shutter those, too.
The former mayor also recently announced a new coal-related donation. Bloomberg told the Associated Press that he plans to donate $3 million to organizations that help unemployed coal miners and their communities find new economic opportunities.
Bloomberg Philanthropies highlighted the struggles of miners in a new film, From the Ashes, to be featured at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York this week.
Coal miners “have paid a terrible price,” he told the AP.

Press link for more: Mashable.com

Scientists up their projections for sea level rise. #auspol

Scientists keep upping their projections for how much the oceans will rise this century

 A 30-mile-long meltwater river runs through Petermann glacier, Greenland, on August 27, 2016. (Whitney Shefte/The Washington Post)

A report by a leading research body monitoring the Arctic has found that previous projections of global sea level rise for the end of the century could be too low, thanks in part to the pace of ice loss of Arctic glaciers and the vast ice sheet of Greenland.
It’s just the latest in a string of cases in which scientists have published numbers that suggest a grimmer picture than the one presented in 2013 by an influential United Nations body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The new Snow, Water, Ice and Permafrost in the Arctic report presents minimum estimates for global sea level rise by the end of the century, but not a maximum. This reflects the fact that scientists keep uncovering new insights that force them to increase their sea level estimates further, said William Colgan, a glaciologist with the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, who contributed to the sea level rise section.
“Because of emerging processes, especially related to the Greenland ice sheet and the Antarctic ice sheet, it now looks like the uncertainties are all biased positive,” Colgan said.
The assessment found that under a relatively moderate global warming scenario — one that slightly exceeds the temperature targets contained in the Paris climate agreement — seas could be expected to rise “at least” 52 centimeters, or 1.7 feet, by the year 2100. Under a more extreme, “business as usual” warming scenario, meanwhile, the minimum rise would be 74 centimeters, or 2.4 feet.
The new findings were published Tuesday as part of a broader overview report by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program, a working group of the intergovernmental Arctic Council, which unites eight Arctic nations, including the United States, and six organizations representing the indigenous peoples of the Arctic.
It is the work of 90 scientists and 28 peer reviewers and is expected to be presented in Fairbanks, Alaska, next month at the next summit of Arctic political leaders.
The report bluntly contrasts its sea level findings with a previous 2013 report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which had put the “likely” low end sea level rise number for these two scenarios at 32 centimeters (about 1 foot) and 45 centimeters (1.5 feet) for the period between 2081 and 2100. That global body — whose high end sea level rise number for the year 2100 was just shy of one meter, or 3.2 feet — has often seen its assertions on sea level rise faulted by scientists for being too conservative.
“These estimates are almost double the minimum estimates made by the IPCC in 2013,” said the new Arctic Council report, which is dubbed a “Summary for Policymakers” because the technical report underpinning it has not yet been released.
The new Arctic report is hardly the first of late to call the IPCC’s figures into question.
An influential study of Antarctica published last year in the journal Nature suggested that the frozen continent alone could nearly double the IPCC’s sea level projections for the end of the century.
(The IPCC did concede that sea levels could be higher than its “likely” forecast in the event of a “collapse of marine-based sectors of the Antarctic ice sheet” — but it added that “there is medium confidence that this additional contribution would not exceed several tenths of a meter of sea level rise during the 21st century.”)
And since then, several other scientific documents — presumably aware of this Antarctic research — have cited the possibility of particularly extreme sea level rise by 2100, even if they cannot necessarily quantify the likelihood of it occurring.
At the close of the Obama administration, a report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration suggested that, at least as an “extreme” case, seas could possibly rise by as much as 8 feet by century’s end.
And yet another report, prepared for the state of California and released this month by a team of climate researchers, has now also presented the possibility of extreme sea level scenarios by 2100 — albeit ones that have either a low or an unknown probability of occurring.
That document looked specifically at California coastlines, and found that for San Francisco, for instance, the “likely” range for sea level rise in the year 2100 under a high global warming scenario would be 1.6 to 3.4 feet. But it also said there was a 1-in-20 chance of 4.4 feet, a 1-in-200 chance of 6.9 feet, and even a chance, whose probability could not be estimated, of 10 feet.
“We’re learning an increasing amount about the instability of marine based ice, and the amount of marine based ice that there is in Antarctica,” said Bob Kopp, a sea level researcher at Rutgers University and one of the authors of the California report. “And as we take more of these processes into account, the extent of the things that we don’t know that much about and aren’t yet able to quantify well has become clearer.”
The report for the Arctic Council, by contrast, focuses on a growing Arctic contribution to sea level rise, rather than an Antarctic one. Antarctica has far greater potential to raise seas over all, but the Arctic report emphasizes that for now, Greenland is actually raising seas the most and that it too has a great deal of potential sea level rise to contribute.
“These estimates of higher sea level contributions from the Arctic will only add to the new, higher estimates of potential sea level contributions from Antarctica — which is not good news,” said Rob DeConto, a geoscientist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who published the aforementioned Antarctica study and also worked on the California study. He was not involved in the new Arctic report.
Here’s a figure that the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland’s Colgan provided, showing the new sea level projections for a modest and more severe warming scenario, as well as the different and changing components of sea level rise over time:

 The sources and amounts of sea level rise from 1850 to the present, and then projected to the year 2100. RCP4.5 represents a modest global warming scenario that’s not too much warmer than the goals contained in the Paris climate agreement, whereas RCP8.5 represents a more severe “business as usual” scenario (William Colgan)

The Arctic report states that Greenland, in particular, lost 375 billion tons of ice per year from 2011 through 2014, enough to single-handedly raise the global sea level by about a millimeter per year. That annual loss, the document states, is “equivalent to a block of ice measuring 7.5 kilometers or 4.6 miles on all sides.”
Meanwhile, the melting glaciers of the Alaskan, Canadian and Russian Arctic are all steadily raising seas as well and could also see their contributions grow. The report therefore estimates that 19 to 25 centimeters (0.6 to 0.8 feet) of sea level rise in this century will come from the Arctic alone, and that must be combined with all the sea level rise contributed by Antarctica, other glacier systems and the steady expansion of seawater itself as it gets warmer.
Because of the difference between the worst case and more moderate sea level rise scenarios, the report concludes that the Paris climate agreement could substantially reduce the global sea level rise seen by 2100, even though seas will still rise considerably under any scenario.
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“You have to have a deliberate and sustained implementation of Paris for 30 years before you see a significant difference in the rate of global sea level rise,” Colgan said.
The Trump administration has been divided over whether to stick with the president’s campaign pledge and withdraw the United States from that agreement. Because of the upcoming G-7 meeting in May, where Trump is likely to be pressed on climate change, many observers expect a decision relatively soon.
It is unclear how the United States may react to the new Arctic report at the upcoming Arctic council meeting — the U.S. is currently chairing the council — or whether this will also put any additional pressure on the Trump administration.
Meanwhile, scientists studying the planet’s ice and its seas continue their work.
“If you look at the history of sea level rise projections over the last 20 years, they’re going up through time,” said Colgan. “Not just because of sea level actually rising, but also because of our understanding of the processes improving through time.”

Press link for more: Washington Post

Why I March #ClimateChange #auspol

Why I March: Climate Change And Migration Have Everything To Do With Each Other

By Thanu Yakupitiyage 

It’s pretty ironic that among Donald Trump’s first policies on his agenda were a crackdown on immigrant communities, followed by the dismantling of climate and environmental protections.

 By rolling back the little progress the U.S. has made on climate change ― as well as slashing the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency and lifting a moratorium on federal coal leases ― Trump’s administration is sending a global message: the U.S. (a country that considers itself a leader) will not meet any commitment to bring down greenhouse gas emissions or invest in clean energy jobs. 

Meanwhile, the world is warming at an alarming rate, with each year hotter than the last. And while the planet warms and more climate-related disasters take place ― droughts get longer, rain patterns shift, land becomes infertile, food and water become scarce, and sea levels rise ― more and more people are migrating due to climate change impacts. These are often the world’s poorest people, from regions that have done the least to contribute to the severity of the climate crisis.

By disregarding the necessity for bold action on climate change, the Trump administration and climate deniers everywhere (the United States, China, India, and Russia have the highest emission rates) are ensuring that communities across the globe continue to be displaced and have no choice but to migrate for their own survival.
While Trump and many in his administration throw brown and black immigrants under the bus using hateful and racist isolationist tactics, calling for “Muslim Bans” and empowering Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to deport millions with little to no due process, his administration’s short-sighted and deliberate decisions to invest in the fossil fuel industry means that he is effectively aiding the process of creating more migrants.

It is estimated that by 2050, there will be 200 million people displaced by climate change-related impacts. According to the International Displacement Monitoring Centre, since 2008, an average of 26.4 million people per year have been displaced from their homes by disasters brought on by natural hazards. Climate change causes migration, and people migrate to flee the impacts of climate change on their homelands.
Make no mistake: people should have the right to migrate no matter what. 

However, the majority of migration happens because people need access to a better life.

 If there is no way for them to live in their homelands ravaged by climate change and other socio-economic impacts, they are left with no choice but to move.
In the United States, people in the Gulf are already being internally displaced due to rising sea levels.

We see this all over the world.

 In the United States, people in the Gulf are already being internally displaced due to rising sea levels. 

Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana, home to the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe, has lost 98% of its land and most of its population to coastal erosion and rising sea levels since 1955. 

The population of the island is now down to less than 85 residents from the previous hundreds. In January 2016, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) funded The Isle de Jean Charles Resettlement Project, the first allocation of federal dollars to move 400 tribe members struggling with the impacts of climate change to inland locations. (This year, the Trump Administration is proposing to slash the HUD budget by 6 billion).
In Mexico, farmers have been dealing with severe drought for decades, leading to a loss of agricultural productivity.

 The outcome?

 More rural Mexicans are migrating to the United States for better futures.

 One study found climate change-driven changes to agricultural livelihoods have impacted the rate of emigration to the United States, estimating that by 2080, climate change-induced migration from Mexico could be up to $6.7 million. Another study argues that undocumented migration to the U.S from rural Mexico very much has to do with climate change and the declining livelihoods of farmers facing droughts and lack of rainfall.
And while many factors have led to the conflict in Syria, some argue that severe drought that started in 2006, worsened by a warming climate, drove Syrian farmers to abandon their crops and flock to cities, helping trigger the civil war. It is widely acknowledged, including by the Pentagon, that climate change acts as a threat multiplier, intensifying conflict and war. The United Nations estimates that there are over five million Syrian refugees now. Within his first 100 days in office, Donald Trump made two attempts to ban refugee resettlement to the U.S from Syria as part of his “Muslim Ban.”
The climate crisis has been decades in the making, but it’s worsening each day that politicians and their fossil fuel ilk sow doubt about its existence. Meanwhile, many Western nations are seeing a rise in xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment at the same time as the displacement of people hits a record high. The road ahead requires that we collectively do what’s right – we must stand up for the rights of migrants everywhere who deserve dignity and respect as they seek better lives for themselves and their families, as we build bold and just solutions to the climate crisis.
That’s why these major actions in the upcoming days are so important. On April 29th, I’ll join tens of thousands in the Peoples Climate March in Washington D.C. There are over 314 sister marches across the United States and around the world. On the 100th day under the Trump administration, we will surround the White House and put forward our vision to build bold solutions for climate, jobs, and justice. Together with a broad spectrum of communities including indigenous peoples, workers, immigrants, and communities of all backgrounds, we understand that mitigating the climate crisis is a matter of social, economic, racial, gender, and immigrant justice.
Then on May 1st, workers and immigrants everywhere will participate in the annual International Workers Day. In light of the assaults on immigrant communities in the United States, this May Day is of particular importance. (Here are just some of the events taking place.) We will harness the energy of the climate march back into our communities to build local solutions and to stand in solidarity with immigrants. We will resoundingly say, “No Ban, No Wall, No Raids,” and push back against a white supremacist and anti-immigrant agenda that aims to divide people, disrespecting the very workers that help uplift America.
There is hope. We’ve seen people fearlessly stand up for justice and it’s imperative that we keep up the momentum. Communities around the world are advocating for more clean energy solutions such as solar paneling and wind power, as well expanding green jobs. We saw the power of inspirational indigenous-led movements like #NoDAPL that called on thousands to push back against destructive pipeline projects. And thousands rose to the occasion to protect and defend immigrants impacted by Donald Trump’s Muslim Ban, as well as to continue to push back against unjust deportations through creating sanctuary spaces.
The clock is ticking for our planet and our communities. Only by seeing these issues as inherently connected can we rise up to demand a fair and just world.

Press link for more: Huffingtonpost.com

A mussel’s view on #ClimateChange #marchforscience #auspol

To understand climate change, look at it from a mussel’s perspective

By Brian Helmuth

Brian Helmuth’s “robomussels” have been deployed around the world to measure the real temperatures experienced by mussels inside their shells.

Brian Helmuth, Northeastern University marine biologist.

The phrase “climate change” triggers images of a huge, global phenomenon. Rising seas. Drought. Ocean acidification.
But it’s actually experienced on a much smaller scale, by individual plants, animals and people.
And most of the world’s organisms experience it much differently than humans do.
“As humans, we have this really biased view of the world. Well over 95 percent of the organisms on Earth, they’re completely dependent on the ambient environment for their temperature,” says Northeastern University marine biologist Brian Helmuth.
Many of those organisms are stuck in one place for most of their lives and depend on ocean currents for food and oxygen.
Helmuth has built his career on trying to better understand how mussels experience temperature and other environmental changes, and he argues it’s essential to look beyond our own human perspective when thinking about climate change. If we don’t, he says, we’ll miss big parts of how our changing world will impact our food sources and surroundings.
“Unless we have a pretty good handle on how those nonhuman organisms are experiencing climate change, we’re not going to have any sense of how further climate change is likely to affect us,” Helmuth says.
Consider the mussel

Think about a mussel that’s stuck to a rock in a tidal area for most of its life. It can’t move to find shade when it’s hot out. It can’t control its own body temperature.
When the tide is low and the sun is out, its dark shell absorbs heat just like asphalt on a summer afternoon.
“You are sitting there in the blazing sun, you’re not going to be able to move,” Helmuth says. “You can’t escape the heat, you can’t escape the sun, you can’t go into a crevice like something like a crab.”
Mussels can literally start to cook on the rocks if they get too hot.
They also have to wait for water currents to bring them plankton to eat and oxygen to breathe.
“The closest thing I can think of to describe what that’s like, is, if you reached down into your chest cavity, you rip out your lungs, and you hold them above your head,” Helmuth says, “and you hope to God that the wind blows because if it doesn’t you’re going to suffocate.”
Stationary creatures evolve to withstand a wide range of climatic conditions, but in some cases, global warming is bringing them closer and closer to their limits.
And it’s not only temperature that’s changing: Water currents in the Atlantic Ocean are changing, too. The ocean is getting more acidic, so it’s harder for mollusks to form the shells that protect them from predators.
All these stressors add up to a harder life for mussels in some parts of the world, including the United States’ East Coast. Wild blue mussel populations have sharply declined in places like the Gulf of Maine in recent decades.
Why do we care?
Seafood is a major protein source, especially for the global poor. Farmed mussels are a $3 billion worldwide industry. Mussels, clams and oysters caught in the US alone were worth more than $400 million in 2015.
If we want the mussel industry and others to thrive, Helmuth argues we need to look at climate change from the right perspective.
Here’s an example: In the 1990s, Helmuth invented a gadget called a “robomussel,” which uses sensors to measure the temperature inside synthetic mussel shells designed to closely replicate the real thing.
Up until then, Helmuth says, scientists generally used to gauge mussel temperature by measuring surrounding air temperature. That is, after all, how we humans experience heat.
Helmuth worked with collaborators to plant these robomussels in mussel beds all around the world. And he made an important finding: Temperatures can grow much hotter inside mussel shells than outside of them, especially if the mussels are out of the water at low tide during the hottest part of the day.
“We can see animal temperatures of 100 degrees or more, even though the air temperature may be as low as 70 [or] 75,” Helmuth says.  
That means some cooler regions that may previously have been seen as hospitable to mussels in a warmer future might, in fact, grow too hot for them.  
“For example, we see places in central Oregon where they’ll really bake, even though it’s pretty far north because all the low tides are happening in the middle of the day,” Helmuth says.
In other places, like in Santa Barbara, California, summertime low tides tend to come in the middle of the night, so mussels there aren’t too stressed.
“If we’re only looking at the edges of species distributions, if we’re only looking at the southern distribution in the Northern Hemisphere, we’re probably missing a lot of the action, a lot of the damage,” Helmuth says.
Helmuth and his colleagues have used robomussel readings and other data to predict where mussels will thrive, and where they’ll likely die, in the future.
His methods are being used by scientists developing marine conservation plans on the US West Coast, and by collaborators working with the aquaculture industry in Italy.
Helmuth hopes that by shifting our perspective, we’ll be able to keep mussels in our waters, and on our menus, well into the future.

Press link for more: MSN.com

Seas could rise by over a metre by 2100 #auspol #climatechange

CSU hosts climate change symposium Thursday
Researchers once thought the more drastic effects of climate change were centuries away, leaving humans time to adjust their conduct to mitigate the damage.
Not anymore.
“The Arctic Ocean is expected to become essentially ice free in summer before mid-century,” reports the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, adding Greenland lost 36 to 60 cubic miles of ice each year from 2002 to 2006, and Antarctica lost 36 cubic miles of ice from 2002 to 2005.

It notes 16 of the 17 hottest years on record have been reported since 2001. Last year was the warmest year on record, with eight of its 12 months the warmest months on record.
Because of melting ice, sea levels worldwide have risen 8 inches since 1880, and are expected to rise from one to four feet by the year 2100.
The warming caused by greenhouse gasses trapped in the Earth’s atmosphere wouldn’t stop now even if humans immediately quit adding more carbon dioxide.
“Even if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, global warming would continue to happen for at least several more decades if not centuries,” says NASA. “That’s because it takes a while for the planet to respond, and because carbon dioxide – the predominant heat-trapping gas – lingers in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.”
The public’s invited to hear more about climate change 6:30 to 8 p.m. Thursday at Columbus State University’s Coca-Cola Space Science Center, 701 Front Ave.
The symposium “Climate Change: The Facts, The Fiction, The Future” features speakers from CSU’s Department of Earth and Space Sciences.
Physics Professor Kimberly Shaw will lead off with “Venus and the Greenhouse Effect: How Scientists Talk About Scientific Knowledge,” followed by geology Professor David Schwimmer talk on “Paleoclimates and What They Tell Us About the Past and Present.”
Columbus has a connection to an ancient climate. The high sea levels of the Cretaceous Period, from 145.5 million to 65.5 million years ago, created Georgia’s Fall Line, the ancient seacoast. The state chose this site for the city of Columbus so mills here could harness the hydropower from the river’s abrupt drop in elevation.
Following Schwimmer will be William Scott Gunter, an assistant professor of atmospheric science, with “Taking Earth’s Temperature: What Global Measurements Tell Us About Climate Change,” and then environmental science Professor Troy Keller will talk about “’Hacking’ Your Carbon Footprint.”
After that, the audience gets about 30 minutes to ask questions, followed by a reception with refreshments.
“This is in a sense a followup to the march on Washington,” Schwimmer said, referring to Saturday’s “March for Science” at the capital.
Those who couldn’t travel to Washington wanted to have a local event, he said.

Press link for more: Ledger-enquirer.com

Arctic Ice Melt Could Cost Trillions by 2100 #auspol

Arctic Ice Melt Could Cost The World Trillions Of Dollars By 2100

By Chris Di’Angelo
WASHINGTON — Climate change, driven by greenhouse gas emissions, is causing the Arctic to warm “faster than any other region on Earth,” according to a new international assessment. 

The thaw there is expected to have “major consequences for ecosystems and society,” potentially costing tens of trillions of dollars by the end of this century.
“The Arctic is showing clear evidence of evolving into a new state before mid-century,” with warmer, wetter and more variable conditions, according to the report from the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program.
By the late 2030s, the report suggests the Arctic could be completely free of summer sea ice, likely resulting in more extreme weather in southern latitudes. 

Without immediate action to curb greenhouse gas emissions, the melting of land-based Arctic ice could raise global sea levels an estimated 10 inches by 2100, threatening coastal communities around the globe. 
“The changes are cumulative, and so what we do in the next five years is really important to slowing down the changes that will happen in the next 30 or 40 years,” James Overland, an oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and an author of the report, said during a media briefing Tuesday.

 “The emphasis on action and immediacy is one of the key findings [of the report].”
It’s yet another terrifying reminder of what’s in store if humans continue with business as usual. 

Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket via Getty Images
A polar bear looks for food at the edge of the pack ice north of Svalbard, Norway.

The new report adds to the findings of the 2011 “Snow, Water, Ice, Permafrost in the Arctic” study, also coordinated by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program.

 Dozens of scientists contributed to the latest assessment, which mainly covers the five years from 2011 to 2015.
The cumulative cost of the changes unfolding in the Arctic could range from $7 trillion to $90 trillion by 2100, researchers found. 
The 200-plus page report calls on governments around the world to take immediate action to cut carbon emissions and to follow through on commitments made as part of the historic Paris climate pact. 

Such steps could stabilize Arctic temperatures in the later half of the century and prevent nearly 8 inches of additional sea level rise, according to the report. 
“The main message that’s coming through in this report, the main message we’d like to convey, is that over the timescale of the next 50 to 100 years, human actions can make a difference in the trajectory of the Arctic climate system,” contributing author John Walsh, a chief scientist at the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska, said in a video accompanying the report.

 “The way the cryosphere — ice and snow — will respond to climate change will depend a lot on the emissions scenarios, which basically are determined by human actions.” 

The assessment comes as President Donald Trump moves to roll back Obama-era policies aimed at reducing the United States’ carbon footprint and fighting climate change. 

Trump previously vowed to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, in which nearly 200 countries committed to cut carbon emissions (there is some indication that cooler heads may prevail).

 He has also dismissed climate change as “bullshit” and a “hoax.” And he has given encouragement to those who support oil and gas development in Arctic waters. 
Margaret Williams, managing director of the World Wildlife Fund’s Arctic Program, said the new report underscores the urgency of reining in emissions and allowing only sustainable development in the Arctic.
“An intact Arctic is critical to our future, but the planet’s air conditioner is in jeopardy,” Williams, who was not involved in the study, said in a statement. “The staggering pace of Arctic warming reinforces the need for scientists to continually engage policymakers and the public about these changes. Smart Arctic policy will come from sound science and shared responsibility.” 
Earlier this month, the International Union for Conservation of Nature called on world leaders to safeguard the Arctic from such threats as oil development and shipping. It highlighted seven marine areas worthy of protection.
This weekend, on Trump’s 100th day in office, thousands of Americans are expected to descend on Washington, D.C., to participate in the People’s Climate March, a demonstration against the president’s environmental policies.

Press link for more: Huffingtonpost.com