The Vanishing North

The Economist magazine ran an editorial and special report in last weeks magazing on the disappearing ice in the Arctic. According to the piece:

"As our special report shows in detail, the Arctic is warming roughly twice as fast as the rest of the planet. Since the 1950s the lower atmosphere has warmed by a global average of 0.7 degrees Celsius; Greenland’s air has warmed by 1.5 degrees. The main reason appears to be a catalytic warming effect, triggered by global warming. When snow or ice melt, they are replaced by darker melt-water pools, land or sea. As a result, the Arctic surface absorbs more solar heat. This causes local warming, therefore more melting, which causes more warming, and so on. This positive feedback shows how even a small change to the Earth’s systems can trigger much greater ones."

A short video illustrates the point. The piece goes on to point out that the disappearance of the ice opens up major oil and gas extraction opportunities, apparently oblivious to the irony of this proposition. It does finally correctly identify the key to solving the problem. which is to price CO2:

"The worry that needs to be taken most seriously is climate change itself. The impact of the melting Arctic may have a calamitous effect on the planet. It is likely to disrupt oceanic circulation—the mixing of warm tropical and cold polar waters, of which the Gulf Stream is a part—and thawing permafrost will lead to the emission of masses of carbon dioxide and methane, and thus further warming. It is also raising sea levels. The Greenland ice sheet has recently shed around 200 gigatonnes of ice a year, a fourfold increase on a decade ago. If the warming continues, it could eventually disintegrate, raising the sea level by seven metres. Many of the world’s biggest cities would be inundated long before that happened. Some scientists argue that the perils are so immediate that mankind should consider geoengineering the atmosphere to avert them..... They may turn out to be right, but there could be enormous risks involved. A slower but safer approach would be to price greenhouse-gas emissions, preferably through a carbon tax, which would encourage the adoption of cleaner technologies..... That shift would be costly, but the costs of inaction are likely to be larger."

But bizzarely finishes with the complacent view that the loss of the arctic woudl be a pity!

"In the end, the world is likely to get a grip on global warming. The survival instinct demands it. But it is likely to lose a lot of the unique Arctic first. That would be a terrible pity."

Beryl's Last Stand

The 2012 Atlantic hurricane season officially began on June 1, 2012 and will officially end on November 30, 2012, dates which conventionally delimit the period when most tropical cyclones develop in the Atlantic basin. However, this  season began early when Tropical Storm Alberto and Tropical Storm Beryl both developed several days before the official start of the season, the first such occurrence since the 1908 Atlantic hurricane season. We are getting the end of Tropical Storm Beryl in Ireland at the moment (as I look out the window sheeting rain and flooded fields) – according to met eireann Meteorologist Gerald Fleming the forecast was for "a month's rain in two days". Munster and Connacht are expected be the worst affected with up to 60mm of rainfall expected.

Scientific American reports in an article about extreme flooding events: “"Big rain events and higher overnight lows are two things we would expect with [a] warming world," says Deke Arndt, chief of the National Climatic Data Center’s Climate Monitoring Branch. Arndt's group had already documented a stunning rise in overnight low temperatures across the U.S. So are the floods and spate of other recent extreme events also examples of predictions turned into cold, hard reality? Increasingly, the answer is yes. Scientists used to say, cautiously, that extreme weather events were "consistent" with the predictions of climate change. No more. "Now we can make the statement that particular events would not have happened the same way without global warming," says Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo. That's a profound change—the difference between predicting something and actually seeing it happen. The reason is simple: The signal of climate change is emerging from the "noise"—the huge amount of natural variability in weather.”

Greenland's glaciers are moving 30 percent faster - rediscovered photos

According to Nature: "Aerial photographs of Greenland from the 1930s — rediscovered in a castle outside Copenhagen — could provide a deeper understanding of the impact of climate change on the island's glaciers than the use of satellite data alone. Most studies of Greenland's glaciers have used satellite imagery collected since the 1960s. Anders Bjørk at the University of Copenhagen and his colleagues found the historical images of 132 Greenlandic glaciers and compared them with more recent satellite data. The comparison shows that, overall, glacier retreat over the past decade has been as vigorous as in a similar period of warming in the 1930s. However, glaciers with edges that reach the ocean tended to retreat more rapidly in the 2000s than in the 1930s, whereas those terminating on land regressed faster 80 years ago than in the 2000s."

According to Benjamin Smith, a University of Washington researcher reported in yahoo news, "The ice losses of the last decade or so largely has wiped out the gains of the midcentury cool period. The current loss of ocean-terminating glaciers is a problem because it is the major contributor to sea level rise, according. Although recent melting has outpaced the 1930s melting, the patterns of melt are similar, Smith says. "This indicates that the retreat in the 2000s was a typical response of the ice sheet to warmer air and ocean temperatures, and that future warming events can be expected to have similar consequences," he wrote.

Recent images reveal that Greenland's glaciers are moving 30 percent faster than they were a decade ago.

Climate Change May Cut Your Summertime Electricity

According to Scientific American, fossil fuel burning power plants aren't only causing climate change, they're likely to suffer from such global warming due to the fact that water, used for cooling fossil fuel plants, is running short, or its temperature is too high to be an effective coolant - which is ironic - according to the piece: "That problem is only going to get worse, according to an analysis in the journal Nature Climate Change. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) By the 2040s, available electricity could be down by 16 percent in the summertime. When you’d most like electricity. To run your air conditioner. To beat the heat. Told you it was ironic."