How Bad Is Global Warming?

[Luther Blissett]

http://www.snowaddiction.org/2014/06/ph ... w.html?m=1

[stillrobertpaulsen]

Thanks Luther. That is breathtaking, in a sobering way.

[Hammer of Los]

...
Mother Earth is Truly Beautiful.

Let'z all work hard togedder to keep Her dat Way.
...

[stillrobertpaulsen]

I'm surprised this story from March has not made it on to this thread yet. I wasn't even aware of it until I read this recent Rolling Stone article, so I must give credit to Al Gore for bringing it to my attention:

The news about the irreversible collapse in West Antarctica caused some to almost forget that only two months earlier, a similar startling announcement had been made about the Greenland ice sheet. Scientists found that the northeastern part of Greenland – long thought to be resistant to melting – has in fact been losing more than 10 billion tons of ice per year for the past decade, making 100 percent of Greenland unstable and likely, as with West Antarctica, to contribute to significantly more sea-level rise than scientists had previously thought.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/ne ... 618?page=3

Here's a more thorough story on it:

Greenland Ice Sheet Loses Its Last Grip

By Becky Oskin, Senior Writer | March 16, 2014 02:02pm ET



Greenland is losing the battle against rising air and ocean temperatures, a new study finds. The last bulwark to fall is the northeast corner of the Greenland Ice Sheet, which started shrinking rapidly in 2003, according to a new study.

"My guess is this is a new record for Greenland," said lead study author Shfaqat Abbas Khan, a climate scientist at the National Space Institute at the Technical University of Denmark. "This was very surprising, because we don't expect huge ice loss in northeast Greenland."

The northeast Greenland ice sheet lost more than 10 billion tons of ice per year since 2003, according to the study, published March 16 in the journal Nature Climate Change. Once thought immune to global warming's effects, melting in northeast Greenland could significantly boost Greenland's contribution sea level rise. [Images: Northeast Greenland's Retreating Glaciers]

Khan and his co-authors found that northeast Greenland's Zachariae glacier retreated 12.4 miles (20 kilometers) in the last decade. For comparison, southwest Greenland's Jakobshavn glacier has retreated 21.7 miles (35 km) in the past 150 years, the researchers said. Jakobshavn is the fastest-flowing glacier on Earth.

"Suddenly we have a new area which will most likely be faster than Jakobshavn in the future," Khan told Live Science.

The shocking results have already sparked debate among Greenland experts, because the ice loss estimates for the northeast are much greater than other recent studies. "Nobody else has really seen this big dynamic [ice loss] signal they're seeing," said Ian Joughin, a glaciologist at the University of Washington's Polar Science Center, who was not involved in the study.

For example, a recent study that estimated ice loss at 178 Greenland glaciers calculated that Zachariae glacier, one of northeast Greenland's three main glaciers, only lost a total of 20 billion tons of ice between 2000 and 2012. Just four glaciers accounted for half of Greenland's melting ice since 2000, and none were in the northwest, the study said. The findings were published Feb. 7 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

"Overall, I would say that this area is likely to lose mass in the future but that there is not a catastrophic retreat going on," Joughin told Live Science.

Big changes, little data

One reason why big discrepancies can arise between similar studies is that data is sparse in northeast Greenland. Researchers estimate ice loss with computer models based on ice thickness, glacier valley shape and ice velocity. In the remote northeast, just a few flight lines from research programs such as NASA's IceBridge cross some critical glaciers.

Khan and his colleagues relied on several data sources — such as satellite data, aerial photos, GPS and airborne radar instruments — to track changes in northeast Greenland's ice.

Satellite images show that the northeast's three main glaciers — Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden glacier, also called 79 North, the Zachariae glacier and the Storstrømmen glacier — all lost ice recently. Previous studies have also noted Zachariae glacier has started flowing faster, increasing its speed by a third. Zachariae drains 16 percent of the Greenland ice sheet, an area twice as large as southwest Greenland's fastest-flowing glacier, the Jakobshavn ice stream.

When ice sheets or glaciers melt, the newly exposed ground rises, because it is free of its heavy burden. GPS monitoring reveals that the land in northeast Greenland started to spring up in 2003, Khan and his colleagues discovered. Before then, the land was relatively stable.

There have been other hints of ice melting in northeast Greenland. In the last decade, observers have noted new icebergs and giant cracks in glaciers here.

Unusually warm air temperatures in 2002 through 2004 triggered the ice loss in northeast Greenland, Khan said. The warm air meant there was less sea ice where glaciers like Zachariae enter the ocean. Sea ice acts like a dam, holding back flowing glaciers. The missing ice meant the northeastern glaciers could accelerate towards the sea, dropping more icebergs to boot. Since 2004, temperatures have gotten colder but the glaciers continue their rapid pace toward the sea, the researchers found. [10 Surprising Results of Global Warming]

"Northeast Greenland used to be considered the last stable part of the Greenland ice sheet," said study co-author Michael Bevis, a geodynamicist at The Ohio State University in Columbus. "This study shows that ice loss in the northeast is now accelerating. So, now it seems that all of the margins of the Greenland ice sheet are unstable."



Melting ice, rising seas

Researchers do agree that Greenland's ice loss has doubled in the last decade, closing in on 400 billion tons per year. More ice is melting than is being replaced by snow.

However, there is disagreement on what the ice loss in Greenland means for future sea level rise. Some models show that many of Greenland's glaciers will eventually slow or even halt their retreat as they shrink back toward choke points in their rocky valleys.

The current consensus is that sea level could rise by 11 inches to 38 inches (28 to 98 centimeters) by 2100, according to the latest IPCC report. One of the biggest questions in this estimate is how fast the ice sheets will melt.

"Greenland is very complex and it's very, very difficult to predict what will happen in the future," Khan said. "This also means our future estimates of sea level rise are also difficult to predict."

And until now, researchers thought northeast Greenland's glaciers weren't kicking in to the increase in melting. "This suggests that Greenland's contribution to global sea level rise may be even higher in the future," Bevis said.

But Joughin thinks the numbers don't add up. "I'm not sure how they arrive at these high thinning rates," he said. "I just don't agree with the numbers they're coming up with."

Expect the debate to advance soon, because other scientists have new results from northeast Greenland that should be published later this year. "This paper highlights that while we know a lot about Greenland, there is work to do to really nail down the numbers," said Richard Alley, a glaciologist at Penn State University, who was not involved in the study but is currently working on northeast Greenland research.

[fruhmenschen]

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DAewtVGP_hY

[stillrobertpaulsen]

World's energy systems vulnerable to climate impacts, report warns
Generators from nuclear reactors to coal-fired power plants will feel the brunt of the weather changes

Fiona Harvey, environment correspondent
theguardian.com, Tuesday 17 June 2014 19.01 EDT


Power plants and electricity distribution networks are particularly vulnerable to droughts and floods. Photograph: Stephen Hird/Reuters

Rising sea levels, extremes of weather and an increase in the frequency of droughts and floods will all play havoc with the world's energy systems as climate change takes hold, a new report has found.

Energy companies are more often cited as part of the problem of climate change, generating the lion's share of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, amounting to around 40% of the total. But they will also suffer as global warming picks up pace, as generators – from nuclear reactors to coal-fired power plants – feel the brunt of the weather changes.

Many large plants are particularly at risk from droughts, because they need water to cool their facilities, and floods, because they lack protection from sudden storms. Electricity distribution networks are also likely to be affected.

The vulnerability of energy systems to natural shocks was shown starkly when the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan had to be closed down following the 2011 tsunami, which prompted governments around the world to review their nuclear policies.

The World Energy Council (WEC), which compiled the study along with Cambridge University and the European Climate Foundation, urged generators to examine their vulnerability to climate change, saying that with suitable adaptations – such as protecting power plants from water shortages and building resilience into power networks – the worst of the problems could be avoided.

Christoph Frei, secretary general of WEC, said governments must play a key role in ensuring the world's vital infrastructure is protected: "Climate change is certain to impact the energy sector. We need robust and transparent policy frameworks to unlock the long-term investments that are urgently needed to deliver the future we want. Leadership will be required at all levels."

Despite efforts to increase energy efficiency, the amount of energy used globally is still set to rise. But the effects of this could be mitigated if companies invest in renewable and low-carbon forms of energy, such as windfarms and nuclear power.

Another key focus must be energy distribution networks – grids – according to the report, as new technology can be used to make grids "smarter", saving energy by distributing energy from generators to users in more intelligent ways than has been the case with existing grid infrastructure technology, much of which is now decades old.

"The time has come to get real about the challenges facing the energy sector," Frei said.

Hundreds of billions of pounds will be needed to invest around the globe in making energy systems more resilient in the coming decade, but most of this is money that must be spent anyway, just to keep the current systems going. If that investment is directed towards lower carbon fuels and greater efficiency, this could cut carbon dioxide emissions in the longer term, the study found. Switching to low-carbon energy would also reduce air pollution and bring health benefits, the authors said.

However, there is little sign so far that energy companies around the world have taken up this message. Fossil fuels continue to dominate new investments in energy generation capacity, according to the International Energy Agency. Attempts to create a global price on carbon emissions, that could help to reverse this trend, have largely foundered.

Philippe Joubert, executive chairman of WEC's global electricity initiative, and former president of Alstom Power, said large companies were taking note. "Leading businesses in this sector increasingly realise that business as usual is no longer possible or acceptable."

The report, released at the Asian Clean Energy Forum on Wednesday in Manila, was based on the latest findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which predicted that the effects of climate change would become vastly more apparent in the coming decades, if no, or inadequate, action was taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

[stillrobertpaulsen]

Published on Monday, June 23, 2014 by Common Dreams

SCOTUS Further Weakens EPA Power to Regulate Greenhouse Gases

Ruling issued Monday cuts back already 'soft' regulatory measures under the Clean Air Act
- Sarah Lazare, staff writer

Pollution in Joliet, Illinois (Photo: Eric Schmuttenmaer / Flickr Creative Commons)

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday placed further limits on the Environmental Protection Agency's already-modest power to regulate power plant and factory emissions of greenhouse gases.

SCOTUS ruled in a 2007 case that greenhouse gases emitted by new motor vehicles constitute pollution that is subject to regulation under the Clean Air Act. Under this act, any polluter that emits more than 250 tons of a recognized pollutant must acquire a permit before expanding or modernizing.

The EPA interpreted the 2007 ruling to mean that greenhouse gases emitted by stationary facilities—including power plants and factories—are also subject to regulation under the Clean Air Act. The agency raised the threshold for regulation of stationary facilities to 100,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year—a move it said was designed to avoid excessive permitting processes, given how prevalent CO2 pollution is.

The SCOTUS ruling on Monday determined that, contrary to the EPA's interpretation, the 2007 ruling on automobiles does not automatically trigger regulations for stationary greenhouse gas emitters. Furthermore, the court ruled that the EPA did not have the authority to rewrite this threshold without congressional approval.

As a result, the EPA cannot require stationary polluters to obtain permits solely on the basis of their production of carbon pollution. However, if a permit was already required for other pollutants, the EPA can force stationary polluters to employ certain technologies to control greenhouse gas emissions.

Yet, according to Bill Snape, senior counsel for the Center for Biological Diversity, these permits are themselves weak regulatory measures. "Most of the permits I looked at were very soft and relatively easy permits to comply with," Snape told Common Dreams. "None of them had hard pollution standard triggers, and they weren't forcing technological changes, just requiring that existing technology work as efficiently as possible."

The ruling—the result of industry, state, and Chamber of Commerce challenges to the EPA—will affect a minority of stationary facilities, as most are so big that they will still be subject to EPA regulation due to non-greenhouse gas emissions. Nonetheless, critics are concerned that cuts to already soft regulations do not bode well for an aggressive plan to combat climate change.

Justice Breyer wrote in his dissenting opinion, "What sense does it make to read the Act as generally granting the EPA the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and then to read it as denying that power with respect to the programs for large stationary sources at issue here?"

Snape said he views the decision as "half disappointing" and noted that it sidesteps the question of "whether the EPA ought to be setting ambient airt quality standards for greenhouse pollutants." He said, "This remains an essential issue: how clean do we want to get our atmosphere?"

Furthermore, the decision highlights continued climate change denial-ism among Supreme Court Justices. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas wrote in an opinion that they would have preferred to leave greenhouse gases completely exempt, writing that the Clean Air Act "is simply not suited for use with respect to greenhouse gases." According to Snape, "Yet again you're seeing the Supreme Court divided on how to deal with global warming."

It is not immediately clear how the court ruling will impact the Obama administration's climate plan, announced earlier this month, to cut carbon emissions from U.S. power plants by 30 percent from 2005 levels by the year 2030.

[stillrobertpaulsen]

The Disaster We’ve Wrought on the World’s Oceans May Be Irrevocable
By Alex Renton / July 2, 2014 6:31 AM EDT



In the great halls of La Boqueria, Barcelona’s central market, tourists, foodies and cooks gather every day to marvel at the fresh food, like pilgrims at the site of a miracle. The chief shrines are the fish counters, where thousands of sea creatures making up dozens of species gleam pink and gray on mounds of ice. But to many ocean scientists this is not a display of the ocean’s bounty but a museum—by the end of this century, many of these animals may be history due to man’s reckless abuse of the planet. As we keep dumping greenhouse gases into the air, the oceans keep sucking them up, making the waters deadly to their inhabitants.

On the Boqueria’s fish stands I count 10 types of bivalves—creatures like clams, oysters and mussels that use calcium carbonate to make their endlessly varied shells. In as little as 20 years they will be very different and, in some parts of the world, entirely gone. Then there are the ranks of huge Asian prawns and tiny shrimps, terra-cotta crabs from Scotland, and lobsters, magnificent admirals in blue fringed with gold. Lucky for them, these creatures make their shells differently (mostly out of a polymer called chitin), so the rapidly acidifying waters of our oceans won’t dissolve them as it will the exteriors of the bivalves. But the acidification—which some scientists believe is the fastest change in the ocean’s chemistry in 300 million years—appears to harm the working of the gills and change the behavior of the crustaceans when they are very young.

On the crushed ice sit a dozen kinds of finned creatures that the Spanish love—monkfish, hake, sardines, tuna. The Spaniards eat more fish than anyone else in Europe. The effect of changing ocean chemistry on fish health, longevity and reproduction is not yet certain. But even now, many species on the Boqueria stalls are also on one or more European “at-risk” lists: under threat because of overfishing or changes in the chain of foods that supply them, or from the bigger threat of the changing ocean biogeochemistry.

The last is the least understood of these phenomena. Along the coasts and out in the deep, huge “dead zones” have been multiplying. They are the emptiest places on the planet, where there’s little oxygen and sometimes no life at all, almost entirely restricted to some unicellular organisms like bacteria. Vast blooms of algae—organisms that thrive in more acid (and less alkaline) seawater and are fed by pollution—have already rendered parts of the Baltic Sea pretty much dead. A third of the marine life in that sea, which once fed all of Northern Europe, is gone and may already be beyond hope of recovery.

“There’s a profound game-changing event going on in the life of the sea,” says Callum Roberts, a professor of marine conservation at the University of York, England. “The fact is that changes in alkalinity are going to cause massive reorganization of marine life, impacts on marine food webs, productivity, all sorts of things. We’re heading for a car crash here.”

Many of these risks are caused by one of the world’s most pressing problems: climate change. Rising greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are causing global temperatures to rise, which is leading to the melting of the polar ice caps, which in turn has resulted in rising sea levels and a host of ecological issues.

It’s also causing the chemical makeup of the world’s oceans to change so rapidly. Carbon dioxide, one of the key perpetrators in the lineup of man-made greenhouse gases, is absorbed by seawater, causing a chemical reaction near the ocean surface that results in lowered pH levels. And about one-third of all the man-made carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere ends up absorbed by the oceans. Carles Pelejero, a scientist working less than a mile from La Boqueria at the Institut de Cienciès del Mar (ICM), on Barcelona’s seafront, calls it “climate change’s evil twin.”

He illustrates the basic mechanism to schoolchildren by getting them to take a straw and blow into a glass of water. A simple litmus test shows the children how the pH level drops as the carbon dioxide from their breath dissolves in the water. It’s a sign that naturally alkaline water is becoming less so—and it’s what is happening on a global scale as the oceans absorb a significant amount of the carbon dioxide we pump out through the burning of carbon fuels. “In preindustrial times the ocean’s pH was 8.2. It has already gone down to 8.1,” says Pelejero. “Depending on what we do, it will reach an average of 7.8 or 7.7 by 2100. It hasn’t been that low for 55 million years.” For reference, the pH scale runs from 0 to 14; the lower the number the more acidic, and the higher the more alkaline.

Pelejero leads part of the ICM’s marine biogeochemistry research, but his field is even more specific: marine paleo-reconstruction. You might call it seabed archaeology; it uses drills to take samples from deep in the sediment at the bottom of the ocean. Scientists can use those samples to work out how the geochemistry of sea creatures has changed over the millennia. Pelejero started in this business in the mid-1990s using the remains of plankton in the sediments on the ocean floor to determine historic sea surface temperatures.

Then, in 1998, while studying a graph at a conference, Joanie Kleypas, an American biologist working on coral reefs, had a eureka moment. When she suddenly realized that the lowered alkalinity at the end of the 21st century would in effect corrode the calcium carbonate foundation of the reefs to destruction, she was so horrified she left the room to be sick. Her paper on the threat, published in the journal Science in 1999, was an alarm call. Other scientists quickly dubbed the effect “ocean acidification”—although the seas would not actually turn to acid, the phrase, they reckoned, would emphasize the urgency and get action. Coral reefs are necessary to an estimated 25 percent of all marine life, including 4,000 species of fish. They are the rain forests of the sea.

Around the same time, Pelejero’s colleagues turned their core-sampling techniques to work out how the ocean and its animals behaved long ago, when the water pH was lower. What they found was horrifying. During a 100,000-year-long event known as the Palaeo-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), which occurred between the Palaeo and Eocene epochs, 55 million years ago, “you see that the sediment is quite white from the fossil shells—then suddenly it turns red,” Pelejero says. “Because there are no shells at all. Then it turns white again—but the change back took more than 100,000 years.” The first change from white to red represents a sudden die-off of shell-based life; the turn back to white shows the gradual return of shellfish over time. If projections hold, the pH change that killed off or radically altered many of the deep ocean shell animals will arrive again at the end of this century.

Other problems are likely to emerge because of the pH change. One of the suggestions is that the stable, solid form of methane—called clathrates—that lurks in the ocean sediment may be upset by changes in water chemistry and temperature, and release the gas into the atmosphere. Methane is a greenhouse gas many times more damaging than carbon dioxide, which has, in the past, turbocharged global warming. This is called the “clathrate gun hypothesis,” and the core samples suggest that this is just what might have happened during the PETM, when large numbers of ocean species (particularly from the deeps of the seas) disappeared and the ocean surface was 9 to 16 degrees Fahrenheit warmer. That doesn’t sound like much. But it’s enough to radically alter life underwater—and to wreak havoc on land dwellers, too. Many of the world’s major cities would disappear beneath the rising waves as the ice melts and the water expands. During the PETM, sea levels were as much as 350 feet higher than they are today—enough to obliterate most of present-day Europe, the northeast coast of the U.S. and Argentina, for example.

What worries Pelejero most is the rapidity of today’s changes. The same shifts that happened over the course of a few thousand years during the PETM are now due to happen over just a few centuries, counting from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and the widespread use of fossil fuels. “The record tells us that, though pH has been lower in the past, this time the changes are happening about 10 times faster. And that means there is no time for species to evolve and adapt, or the ocean to buffer itself,” Pelejero says. “It’s clear that the ocean is acidifying, much clearer than that the world is warming. And we know that most of the effect is caused by man’s actions. The only argument among scientists is over how much damage is being done.”

Already some effects are being seen. Across the world, shells of some animals are thinner than they were 300 years ago. An acidification spike around the coast of British Columbia in February 2014 wiped out 10 million scallops. Foraminifera, the tiniest shelled plankton in the ocean, are having trouble growing (as they did during the PETM)—and plankton is the food base of every animal in the sea. Coccolithophores, the shelled plankton that process sunlight like a plant, and whose remains built the White Cliffs of Dover, seem to suffer from current changes in ocean chemistry.

Pteropods, tiny swimming snails, are the main diet of cold-water fish most commonly consumed in both Europe and North America—salmon, haddock, cod and pollack. In the lab, pteropods dissolve in lowered alkali waters, like a tooth in Coca-Cola. In the Arctic, where acidification is progressing fastest, pteropods may already be on the way out. It is as though the Earth were losing its grass, and the cows had nothing to eat.

Rising Tides Kill All

A day after visiting the fish markets, I lounged on the deck of a tiny former fishing boat off the northern Catalan coast, as oceanologists threw up into the lurching waves around us. We were off to take ICM’s monthly water samples.

The boat is skippered by a remarkable man, 63-year-old Josep Pascual, a legend around the fishing ports of the Costa Brava. As a boy, he went out in this boat with his father and grandfather to net fish for the market. “I used to listen to them, talking as fishermen do about the weather and the sea temperature, and I got interested.”

He decided to add some hard data to the family debate. So since the mid-1960s he has been building his own instruments, and taking a daily record of sea temperatures at different depths in the Mediterranean current off the fishing port of Estartit, Spain. In that little harbor there’s a box containing an ingenious gadget attached to the seawall that measures the height of the sea. “I built it from parts that were thrown out of the old meteorological station,” Pascual says. “I’d read in a book that there were no tides in the Mediterranean—I wanted to prove that was wrong.” He succeeded, and he has also shown that the average sea level in the Mediterranean has risen about 3.5 inches over the past 24 years. That is in line with the global calculations of melting ice cover made by climate change scientists. The rising sea levels, of course, are caused by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere—which are also what’s causing acidification.

Pascual’s work came to the attention of the ICM in the early 1970s. Ever since then, ICM and Pascual have worked together. The fishing nets and lines on the Fiera del Mar are now replaced by global positioning systems, depth-measuring tools and complex thermometer instruments. They have done this long enough to prove significant warming of the Costa Brava sea.

Seven years ago, sponsored chiefly by the Catalan and Spanish governments, Pascual, Pelejero and their assistants started making monthly trips to measure the ocean’s acidity. These have yet to produce conclusive results—there hasn’t yet been enough time to confirm the clear drop in pH that has been observed out in the open oceans.

Pascual is a smiling, sea-worn man, his nut-brown face in sharp contrast to the biochemists’ laboratory pallor. I ask what he really thinks is going on. “What I’m shocked by most is the rising sea level—and I am convinced this is caused by climate change, and that it is mankind that has done it,” he says. “It’s worrying, because the oceans are so important in capturing the carbon. They thermo-regulate the planet. These changes in their systems are very big, and they should make us worry.”

Into the Dead Zone

Off the desert coast of Oman last winter, I saw the strangest thing I’d ever seen in a lifetime of sea voyaging. Heading in a rigid inflatable boat toward a snorkeling site, my family and I all gasped suddenly as the creamy-white of the wake turned a virulent, toxic-looking green. It had an ammoniac stink, and it stayed that way for the next mile.

“No farming nearby? River estuaries?” asked Esther Garcés, a marine biologist at ICM, when I told her this story. None. The Omani coast I saw was mountain and desert. “Probably a normal, seasonal phytoplankton bloom.”

She showed me spectacular pictures, taken from a European Space Agency satellite, of a green-blue swirl occupying most of the Bay of Biscay, between western France and northern Spain. Garcés’s specialty is harmful blooms of algae and plankton: She makes weekly risk assessments for the whole of the Catalan coast. The chief issue is their potential harm to shellfish farms—when the bivalves eat the algae, the former can become toxic to humans who consume them later. (Less pressing is the fact that they make the tourist beaches look as if they are covered in green slime.)

All such blooms are on the increase, mostly due to pollution from humans on land. Sewage, extra carbon in the atmosphere and the runoff of artificial fertilizers all feed different plankton forms, making the blooms fantastically big. Human tampering with the shape of the coast can create vast areas away from the waves where the algae can peacefully breed.

The 21st century’s algae can have adverse effects far beyond weird-colored water and a smell. The key problems come when plankton die. “The toxins released kill fish and other marine life,” says Garcés, “and then there’s the problem of hypoxia and dead zones.” As the algae blooms die out, the matter that drops from the blooms to the bottom of the ocean eats oxygen as it decomposes (with the help of the bacteria that feed on the dead plankton), and hypoxic (low oxygen) and anoxic (total depletion of oxygen) zones kill everything that needs oxygen to live.

Dead zones move and fluctuate, so they are hard to measure. Oceanographers believe they have increased exponentially since the 1960s, and now count over 400 across the globe. One of the world’s largest is off the Mississippi Delta, caused by algae blooms fed mainly by excess chemical fertilizers spread over the land through which the Mississippi flows. Though it changes from year to year, the Mississippi Delta dead zone has been recorded as large as 8,000 square miles, roughly the size of New Jersey.

Scientists diving in it are quoted by Roberts, in his book Ocean of Life: “As you go deeper, it gets kind of scary. Because there’s nothing there. There’s no fish, no organisms alive, so it’s just us.”

The Mississippi Delta zone is the world’s second biggest coastal hypoxic area, after the Black Sea. But out in the open oceans, hundreds of feet below the surface, there are dead zones so huge they may be bigger than the Sahara Desert—the largest lifeless spaces this side of the moon.

There are three different forces that create zones where there's so little oxygen that most life forms disappear. “Upwellings” in parts of the ocean are natural, caused by ocean currents or undersea seismic activity. Periodically they bring nutrients and phytoplankton (a group of plankton that use sunlight for energy) to the surface. In sunlight this mass feeds on algae blooms, until it dies and the bacteria thrive in their turn, eating the dead plankton and absorbing more oxygen. The Black Sea is stagnant and dead from about 500 feet below its warm surface because of its natural geological structure, and the fact that there are few currents to mix up the oxygen-rich surface with the dark, highly acidic waters below. But a crucial sea for human food, the Baltic, has died because of the mess humans make.

Algae blooms have been a feature of the Baltic since the 19th century, initially because nutrient-filled soil ran off as the native forest was cut down to fuel the industries and build the cities of Northern Europe. Then more plankton food was added by the runoff of pollution from the busy Baltic coastline (which includes major cities like St. Petersburg, Russia; Copenhagen, Denmark; Stockholm; Riga, Latvia; and Helsinki) as well as slurry from the industrialized pig farms that are a major business in parts of Germany and Denmark. Now much of the seabed is covered in life-choking seaweed (a multicellular type of algae), and fish eggs from species like cod cannot survive in the low-oxygen environment.

“The Nordic people have made a huge effort to control the runoff of nutrients into the Baltic,” says Garcés. “But it is too late. The nutrients don’t go away. Every time the organisms grow they die and go back to the bottom again, eating more oxygen. Biodiversity is like a dictionary, and this process in the ecosystem is like losing words. We cannot get them back.”

No Fish for You

The one thing that the Boqueria fishmongers doesn’t sell is jellyfish (there’s not much demand for them in Spain, or anywhere else in Europe), though you can find them, dried to a plastic scab, in some Chinese supermarkets. There are those who say that jellyfish and plankton are all that your average wild seafood eater will have for supper by the end of the century—the very rich will likely still be able to pay up for ultra-rare food items. That’s because as the food chain’s intricate links collapse, the complex species will go first, leaving only the most simple. “The oceans [will] revert to the earliest days of multicellular life,” Roberts drily puts it. There’s a terrifying argument that jellyfish—who rather enjoy acidification—are already taking over the seas, if not the world.

The answers are not easy. Some of the clever “geoengineering” suggestions offered to tackle global warming—like artificially cutting off sunlight—won’t work for the oceans, because we can’t just incrementally slow down the acidification — we have to remove the excess carbon dioxide that’s already out there in the atmosphere. Doing that takes economically painful initiatives—replanting vast areas of forest to recapture carbon, for example, and, above all, simply stopping the burning of fossil fuels.

There are some causes for hope. Some world leaders are beginning to take these threats more seriously. In June, for example, the Obama administration announced a series of measures aimed to conserve the ocean as a key food supply for more than 3 billion of us. These included more ocean sanctuaries to curtail overfishing, and new funds to research ocean biochemistry, including acidification.

Roberts, for his part, says that he has been happy to see that coral reefs have proved more adaptable—faster and faster at recovering from the effects of acid and ozone layer depletion—than scientists previously thought. Recent research suggests than in the more acidic waters predicted for the late 21st century, the reefs may survive a little better than Kleypas and her colleagues originally expected.

“That’s got to be cause for hope,” says Roberts. “But these are isolated instances—they say life is possible in these altered environments, they don’t say that means species will thrive in 2100. Evidence from around the world is that they will not. We have the loss of one of the world’s major habitats on the cards. It’s already happening.”

[fruhmenschen]

by now you are all smart climate warming consumers

I will be boycotting ALL Palm Oil products starting with Ivory Soap. call
Proctor and Gamble Yeah Obamaroid appointed the former President of PG to head up the VA
https://www.pg.com/en_CA/product_card/pb_ivory.shtml


https://news.vice.com/article/indonesia ... r-palm-oil



Asia & Pacific
Indonesia Is Killing the Planet for Palm Oil

By Samuel Oakford
July 4, 2014 |

Indonesia is being deforested faster than any other country in the world, and it has everything to do with one product: palm oil.

According to a new study in the journal Nature Climate Change, deforestation in the Southeast Asian archipelago is nearly double the rate in the Amazon. Indonesia is said to have lost 840,000 hectares (3,250 square miles) of forest in 2012 while Brazil — which has four times Indonesia’s rainforest — lost a still-massive 460,000 hectares.

The report’s authors found that government figures underestimated the true toll of forest clearing by as much as half. In the last 12 years, it’s possible that the destruction of one million hectares of “primary forest” went unreported.

The tree-killing spree is largely due to slashing and burning vegetation for the expansion of palm oil plantations to feed growing demand in countries like China and India. Americans and Europeans are still far and away the top consumers per capita — it’s estimated that palm oil can be found in roughly half the manufactured goods in any supermarket or drug store. Everything from peanut butter to soap to cosmetics contains the oil in its various forms.

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The oil palm, from which palm oil is extracted, is native to West Africa but was brought to Asia’s tropical regions by traders during the mid-19th Century. Today it is grown across the globe between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn — but Indonesia and Malaysia produce upwards of 85 percent of a global market that is now worth 44 billion dollars.

From less than 800 square miles in 1967, palm oil cultivation in Indonesia now commands over 40,000 — an area roughly the same size as Ohio.

Fires in Indonesia produce some of the world’s worst pollution, sending suffocating smog to cities hundreds of miles away in Malaysia and Singapore.

Ironically, a 2011 moratorium in Indonesia on deforestation for plantations had the paradoxical effect of increasing clearing. Since the law only applied to new concessions and included a sunset on existing ones, companies worked overtime to cut, burn, and bulldoze as much of the rainforest as they could.

Clearing rainforest to make way for plantations has taken a heavy toll on local communities, destroyed natural habitats for endangered species, and become a critical (if underreported) factor in climate change. Replacing natural forests with palm oil plantations vastly diminishes the ability of vegetation to capture and store carbon dioxide. It’s estimated that deforestation contributes up to 20 percent of global warming.

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In Indonesia, where much of the land consists of carbon-rich soil known as peat, the problem is acute. Water-logged peat is commonly found in the jungles of Sumatra and Borneo, and merely exposing it to the air releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Smoke billowing from illegal wildfires on the Indonesian island of Sumatra blows east toward southern Malaysia and Singapore in 2013, pushing pollution levels to record levels. (Image via NASA)

Though illegal, huge swaths of Indonesia are burned each year to clear forest for plantations, drastically increasing the release of carbon dioxide. Fires in peat-heavy areas can smolder for months or even years before they die out. Degradation of forest and peaty areas accounts for over 60 percent of carbon emissions in Indonesia. The country is the world’s third-worst emitter of greenhouse gases behind the US and China.

Fires in Indonesia produce some of the world’s worst pollution, sending suffocating smog to cities hundreds of miles away in Malaysia and Singapore. A thick haze from the island of Sumatra enveloped Indonesia’s neighbors last year, causing an environmental crisis and prompting Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to apologize. This year has been no better.

The clear-cutting of rainforest each year decimates the habitat of endangered species like orangutans, Sumatran tigers, Bornean rhinos, and pygmy elephants. In 2006 it was estimated that workers had clubbed at least 1,500 orangutans to death after they wandered onto palm oil plantations. Deforestation has caused the death of some 50,000 orangutans in the past two decades — which is now roughly the same number believed to remain in the wild.

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For people living in these areas, the loss of wildlife is reflective of their own plight. Collusion between corrupt government officials and plantation owners has increased illegal land seizures and effectively transformed residents overnight from subsistence farmers to forced labor — a practice that has been explicitly reported by the US Department of Labor at palm plantations in Malaysia, with child labor reported in Sierra Leone and Indonesia. Those who don’t cooperate may face the brunt of mercenaries hired by local suppliers.

“Subsistence forest dwellers are turned into wage slaves,” Jeff Conant, director of the environmentalist organization Friends of the Earth’s international forests program, told VICE news. “Rather than subsisting off the land, they work for very minimal wages.”

Even where communities are allowed to plant their own crops, locals end up growing oil palms because the only purchasers in the region are neighboring plantations. The money they earn is in turn often funneled back into those companies through stores they operate in the area, trapping them in a cycle of peonage similar to American sharecroppers a century ago.

“Governments say it’s the way to lift people out of poverty,” said Conant. “But that sets up this false dichotomy between environmental protection and economic growth, when in fact the economic growth benefits only the corporations.”

'Pretty much anywhere there’s rainforest it’s now lucrative to cut down the rainforest and plant oil palms.'

But because producing palm oil is so efficient — by some estimates up to ten times more so than other vegetable oils, and therefore requiring considerably less space for cultivation — it puts environmentalists in the awkward position of lobbying against a crop that could theoretically stave off further deforestation if it were managed properly.

“What you hear a lot is that global demand for palm oil is growing, which leads one to think that consumers somehow want palm oil,” said Conant. “But they want it because it’s cheap to produce, and it’s cheap to produce in part because companies are bucking economic, social, and environmental concerns. It’s the scale of the industry that’s really the problem.”

Public shaming has helped somewhat. Several multinational conglomerates have pledged to source their palm oil from sustainable producers. The world’s largest palm oil trader, Singapore-based Wilmar International, announced last year that it would stop working with suppliers that deforested virgin forests, burned peat, or exploited locals. But Friends of the Earth is skeptical of Wilmar — as they are of industry groups like the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, which they’ve called a “sham.”

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In an age of sprawling and outsourced supply chains, companies can have trouble determining the conditions where the materials they use are produced. By the same token, they feel less culpable should those suppliers violate human rights and environmental laws — a similar logic behind companies’ use of sweatshops.

Though the gravity of Indonesia’s plight demands particular attention, palm oil production is spreading.

In Uganda, the government is letting foreign companies build plantations on extremely sensitive islands in Lake Victoria. Drive very far along the Gulf of Guinea in West Africa and you’re bound to encounter alien-looking fields of oil palms, their mordant red fruit grown into plastic bags, ready to be picked. In Nigeria, Wilmar plans to tear down some of the country’s last remaining rainforest. But locals in Liberia are fighting back with government support against a land grab by a company called Equatorial Palm Oils. Should they succeed, their victory could provide a model for local resistance to seizures elsewhere.

With palm oil demand set to double by 2030, environmentalists have their work cut out for them. Already, the UN’s Environmental Program (UNEP) predicts that most of Indonesia’s rainforest could be destroyed by 2022.

“Pretty much anywhere there’s rainforest it’s now lucrative to cut down the rainforest and plant oil palms,” said Conant.

Follow Samuel Oakford on Twitter: @samueloakford

msfreeh
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[fruhmenschen]

China flooding forms seven-metre-deep lake in Hunan province

8 hours ago

Heavy rainfall in parts of China has formed a lake of more than 150 sq km (58 sq miles).

The flooding in Hunan province is up to seven metres (23ft) deep in some areas.

Torrential rain across central and southern China has submerged cars, houses and entire roads, leaving some people stranded.

Emily Thomas reports.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-28182485

[stillrobertpaulsen]

Bad news about rising sea levels as quickening Antarctic winds lead to faster ice melt

July 7, 2014

Peter Hannam


An 'OMG' moment for ice researchers.

Sea levels may rise much faster than predicted because climate models have failed to account for the disruptive effects of stronger westerly winds, Australian-led research has found.

Recent studies of Antarctica have suggested the giant glaciers of West Antarctica may have begun an irreversible melting that will raise sea levels by as much as 3 metres over 200-500 years.

That estimate, though, may prove optimistic because models had failed to account for how strengthening westerly winds in the Southern Ocean would start to impinge coastal easterlies, upsetting a delicate balance of warm and cold waters close to the Antarctic ice sheets, said Paul Spence, an oceanographer at the University of NSW’s Climate Change Research Centre.


"If you were buying land in Australia and wanting to pass it down to your kids or your grandchildren, I suggest it’s a couple of metres above sea-level". Photo: Wolter Peeters

“It’s the first time that I looked at my science and thought, 'Oh my god, that is very concerning'!”, he said. “You hope it’s wrong and you hope it doesn’t happen.

“If you were buying land in Australia and wanting to pass it down to your kids or your grandchildren, I suggest it’s a couple of metres above sea-level,” Dr Spence said.

The research, published in Geophysical Research Letters, found that the coastal temperature structure was more sensitive to global warming, particularly the changes to winds, than previously identified.


Warming up already under way. Photo: GRL

“The dynamic barrier between cold and warm water relaxes, and this relatively warm water just offshore floods into the ice-shelf regions, increasing the temperatures by 4 degrees under the ice shelf,” he said.

“If you look at how sensitive the coastal ocean is to these changing winds, you could put a lot more heat under these ice shelves than people have previously thought,” Dr Spence said.

A study released earlier this year by UNSW’s Matt England – also an author on this new research – found westerly winds in the Southern Ocean had quickened 10-15 per cent over the past 50 years, and shifted 2 to 5 degrees closer to the South Pole.


Warming already observed. Photo: GRL

The ozone hole over Antarctica is one factor contributing to the changing winds, along with greenhouse gas emissions, Professor England’s paper found. While the recovery of the ozone layer in coming decades – as fewer ozone-depleting chemicals are released – will slow the wind, any slack would likely be taken up by rising levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

Dr Spence said his team’s study was based on more than 30 models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and turned up results that shocked the researchers.

The new modelling shows it doesn’t take much additional wind to the system “to really, dramatically upset" conditions, he said. “It’s a system really dramatically ripe for change.”


Destructive winds: Impact had previously not been taken into consideration. Photo: AFP

Tas van Ommen, a principal research scientist at the Australian Antarctic Division, said the research helped explain the mechanism that is causing the rapid melting of the West Antarctic glaciers now being observed.

“This paper is a necessary first step to actually closing some the understanding gaps,” Dr van Ommen said.

While predictions of future sea-level rise were difficult to make, “adding a few tenths of a metre from ice instability this century is a significant concern”, he said.

Even 10 centimetres of sea-level rise tripled the flooding frequency of the world’s coastal regions, he said.

(Link to Geophysical Research Letters website.)

[Ben D]

Antarctic Sea Ice anomaly continues to see record levels....

[stillrobertpaulsen]

Well, if that doesn't take the cake. In the annals of Climate Denial Bullshit Arguments, here is one of the all-time jawdroppers. Forget about solar flares, natural cycles, Jay-zus won't allow it and all that other shit. Because...

MARS, BITCHES!


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCF_Yy3oFNo

Go back to bed, America.

[Ben D]

^ Haha....though it's really not a laughing matter...if this is an example of global superpower US government....though I do note he is from Kentucky...hillbilly factor perhaps?

[stillrobertpaulsen]

^ Haha....though it's really not a laughing matter...if this is an example of global superpower US government....though I do note he is from Kentucky...hillbilly factor perhaps?

I never thought I would say this about one of your posts on this thread, Ben D, but I completely agree with you. There certainly is a hillbilly factor with Brandon Smith, just as there is a hick factor with the most vocal Climate Denial member of the U.S. Senate, James "the Bible refutes Climate Change" Inhofe from Oklahoma. But there's another dimension to the propagation of their position: money. Sen. Inhofe has received more than $1.3 million in contributions from the oil and gas industry since 1999. Smith, a Kentucky State Senator, is the Retail Operations Director for Perry Oil Company and three of his top five donors for 2012 came from coal companies.

This is not to say it is only the Climate Deniers who are corrupt; I've gone on record with my displeasure of how Al Gore uses the Climate Change platform to appeal to corporate greed. Just stating that I agree with the Upton Sinclair quote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" And yes, it's really not a laughing matter.