THE DEFINITIVE BLOG FOR EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT YOU LIVE IN, WITH REFERENCE TO LIFE, EARTH AND COSMIC SPACE SCIENCES, PRESENTED BY ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEER DORU INDREI, ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY AND ENERGY SPACIALIST
"Life is not about what we know, but what we don't know, craving the unthinkable makes it so amazing, that is worth dying for."Doru Indrei
The first comprehensive report from the government into the potential effects of climate change has indicated both risks and opportunities for the UK.
On the one hand, flooding, heatwaves and water shortages are likely, but better shipping lanes through the Arctic, higher crop yields, and fewer cold-related deaths in the winter are potential benefits.
The 2,000-page report has been in the works for three years and was prepared by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. It considers multiple climate change scenarios based on computer modelling that consider how 11 different areas of British life, including agriculture and transport, might react to different levels of global emissions cuts.
Assuming nothing is done in preparation, negative outcomes include between 580 and 5,900 deaths above the average per year by the 2050s, and water shortages in the north, south and east of England (and particularly in the Thames Valley area) and between £2.1 billion and £12 billion more damage from flooding by the 2080s.
On the other hand, shorter shipping routes to Asia would be opened up by melting Arctic sea ice, and milder winters should mean both 3,900 to 24,000 fewer premature deaths from cold-related causes and longer growing seasons yielding 40 to 140 percent greater wheat yields and 20 to 70 percent greater sugar beet yields.
Environment secretary Caroline Spelman said: "It shows what life could be like if we stopped our preparations now, and the consequences such a decision would mean for our economic stability."
An unassuming-looking old car powered not by gas, but by coffee, recently broke the land speed record for a vehicle powered by gasification, clocking in at a cool 66.5 miles per hour on average. Gasification works by introducing oxygen or steam to an organic, carbon-based material (such as coffee beans, in this case) and increasing the temperature until a synthetic gas made of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, hydrogen and methane is created and burned up by a regular internal combustion engine.
Environment-Clean-Generations
The Coffee Car, originally built by British engineers for the BBC show Bang Goes the Theory, already holds a world record, for longest journey by a coffee-powered car (over 200 miles), and now the second generation has proven itself on the speed front as well. The previous record, held by Americans, was just 47 mph, and the car was fueled by wood chips. In this case, it looks like coffee, the same sweet nectar that gives so many working men and women around the world the energy to go the distance, has proven superior once again.
Get acquainted with the Coffee Car in the video below, or check out the record-breaking drive over at the BBC.
Rising sea levels in the coming centuries is perhaps one of the most catastrophic consequences of rising temperatures. Massive economic costs, social consequences and forced migrations could result from global warming. But how frightening of times are we facing? Researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute are part of a team that has calculated the long-term outlook for rising sea levels in relation to the emission of greenhouse gases and pollution of the atmosphere using climate models.
The results have been published in the scientific journal Global and Planetary Change.
"Based on the current situation we have projected changes in sea level 500 years into the future. We are not looking at what is happening with the climate, but are focusing exclusively on sea levels," explains Aslak Grinsted, a researcher at the Centre for Ice and Climate, the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen.
Model based on actual measurements
He has developed a model in collaboration with researchers from England and China that is based on what happens with the emission of greenhouse gases and aerosols and the pollution of the atmosphere. Their model has been adjusted backwards to the actual measurements and was then used to predict the outlook for rising sea levels.
The research group has made calculations for four scenarios: a pessimistic one, an optimistic one, and two more realistic ones.
In the pessimistic scenario, emissions continue to increase. This will mean that sea levels will rise 1.1 meters by the year 2100 and will have risen 5.5 meters by the year 2500.
Even in the most optimistic scenario, which requires extremely dramatic climate change goals, major technological advances and strong international cooperation to stop emitting greenhouse gases and polluting the atmosphere, the sea would continue to rise. By the year 2100 it will have risen by 60 cm and by the year 2500 the rise in sea level will be 1.8 meters.
For the two more realistic scenarios, calculated based on the emissions and pollution stabilizing, the results show that there will be a sea level rise of about 75 cm by the year 2100 and that by the year 2500 the sea will have risen by 2 meters.
Rising sea levels for centuries
"In the 20th century sea has risen by an average of 2mm per year, but it is accelerating and over the last decades the rise in sea level has gone approximately 70% faster. Even if we stabilize the concentrations in the atmosphere and stop emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, we can see that the rise in sea level will continue to accelerate for several centuries because of the sea and ice caps long reaction time. So it would be 2-400 years before we returned to the 20th century level of a 2 mm rise per year," says Aslak Grinsted.
He points out that even though long-term calculations are subject to uncertainties, the sea will continue to rise in the coming centuries and it will most likely rise by 75 cm by the year 2100 and by the year 2500 the sea will have risen by 2 meters.
Ocean levels have risen several inches over the last century, and that's only likely to increase going forward. Most of that is related to climate change — but now scientists may have discovered a hidden factor in all this: irrigation.
At first glance, that might seem surprising. After all, irrigation is just moving water from one area to another, to allow people to live in naturally dry or arid areas. The problem is that not all irrigation comes from water already on the surface - a lot of it is now extracted from deep underground, introducing tons of extra water that would not otherwise be a part of the planet's water cycle.
Researchers from the US Geological Survey calculated that the last century saw over a thousand cubic miles worth of water extracted from underground and used for irrigation purposes.
That was enough water to boost ocean levels by about half an inch, accounting for 12.6% of the total sea level rise in the 20th century.
And all this isn't likely to stop anytime soon. Ground water extraction has skyrocketed in the last decade, with some estimates say we're now bringing up about 34 cubic miles each year. That's enough to increase sea levels by .016 inches each year, which is 13% of the current rise.
While melting ice and other climate-related factors remain responsible for the vast majority of the sea level increase, this adds a new wrinkle to how we use irrigation and ground water going forward.
An NAS workshop looks to offset the effects of global warming with intensive, large-scale engineering projects to intentionally alter the climate. Does anyone think this is a good idea?
Ever since prehistoric man first set fires to drive game towards hunters and cliffs, humans have altered their environment for their own gain. No more so than in the years since the Industrial Revolution, when carbon emissions began to drastically alter Earth's climate and atmosphere.
And now that we know definitively that humans can alter Earth's climate, some scientists have begun investigating ways to deliberately change the weather to offset the negative impact of a century of inadvertent human generated climate change.
The name for that deliberate, targeted climate change is geoengineering, and its on the mind of everyone from the National Academy of Sciences to Barack Obama's science adviser.
On Monday, the National Academy of Sciences held a workshop on geoengineering, following an interview where White House Science Adviser John Holdren recommended increased research into the subject. While the scientists at the workshop agreed that it was possible, there was disagreement about when to start testing the ideas, and whether or not the cure might be worse than the problem.
According to National Public Radio, one of the more popular ideas involves seeding the sky with sulfur particulate to reflect the rays of the sun and cool the Earth. This solution mimics the changes in climate that follow large volcanic eruptions. In a recent article, The Atlantic Monthly deemed this the "Blade Runner scenario," and listed some other possible geoengineering schemes, including pouring huge amounts of iron into the ocean to encourage carbon-absorbing algae blooms and using a fleet of 1,500 ships to churn up seawater to create more light reflecting clouds.
As Matt Springer at ScienceBlogs notes, no one is sure if any of these plans will work, if geoengineering is even legal, or what unintended nightmare consequences may result from wholesale disruption of the Earth's carefully balanced ecosystem.
The global warming that results from man-made carbon emissions has shown that we can profoundly alter the climate. But the scientists interviewed in all those articles seem torn by the question of whether or not more human generate change is the appropriate, cheapest, and safest way to address the climate problem.
The Earthly impact of the Sun's 11-year solar cycle has always seemed like one of the more reliable and straightforward elements in the vast array of climate variables. On the rise, solar radiation increases and so warms the planet a little -- the thinking goes -- and on the way down a subtle cooling takes place.
Now, a new piece of research argues that's not necessarily so. Looking inside at the individual wavelengths of solar radiance as measured by a satellite-borne device called the Spectral Irradiance Monitor, scientists report that in their study of these measurements during the declining phase of the solar cycle between 2004 and 2007, the opposite pattern emerges.
Reporting in the journal Nature, scientists from the University of Colorado and Imperial College London say that the amount of visible radiation reaching Earth actually increased rather than decreased during this period of solar cycle decline, slightly warming rather than cooling the planet.
With these findings in hand, the researchers observe that the overall increase in solar activity during the past century may have led to a small cooling effect from the Sun, rather than a warming effect as previously thought.
Physicist Joanna Haigh of Imperial College, lead author of the study, cautioned:
"We cannot jump to any conclusions based on what we have found during this comparatively short period and we need to carry out further studies to explore the Sun's activity, and the patterns that we have uncovered, on longer timescales. However, if further studies find the same pattern over a longer period of time, this could suggest that we may have overestimated the Sun's role in warming the planet, rather than underestimating it."
Researchers are making headway against one of the most deceptively difficult problems in climate science: What happens to clouds in a warming world? Are there more, or fewer, and do they make matters better or worse?
A team of University of Hawaii-Manoa researchers from the U.S. and Japan report that a regional atmospheric model has achieved a breakthrough in the depiction of the impact of warming temperatures on cloudiness in the eastern Pacific Ocean, something that large global climate models have failed to accomplish.
It doesn't qualify as a dramatic Eureka! moment, but in climate science, progress on this front is a big deal, because this failure of the large, supercomputer-driven global climate models to accurately capture the role of clouds in our changing climate is a major source of uncertainty in their forecasts.
"All the global climate models we analyzed have serious deficiencies in simulating the properties of clouds in present-day climate," said lead author Axel Lauer in a statement released by UHM. "It is unfortunate that the global models' greatest weakness may be in the one aspect that is most critical for predicting the magnitude of global warming."
Unfortunately, the news from the University of Hawaii team, reporting in the Journal of Climate, apparently confirms earlier estimates that the response of clouds to rising sea surface temperatures amplifies the warming trend, leading scientists to suggest that our future lies at the warmer high end of the spread of model uncertainty rather than the cooler low end.
Higher sea surface temperatures cause low-level marine clouds to dissipate, the thinking goes, allowing more of the sun's warming rays to break through, causing a further rise in ocean temperatures. . . and so on.
In the same stretch of the eastern North Pacific, similar "positive feedback" results were reported last summer by a team led by Amy Clement of the University of Miami, who compared observations made by sailors with measurements taken by satellite-borne instruments, but is the first report of a model successfully capturing the effect.
"If our model results prove to be representative of the real global climate, then climate is actually more sensitive to perturbations by greenhouse gases than current global models predict, and even the highest warming predictions would underestimate the real change we could see," said co-author Kevin Hamilton.
The evidence that humans are causing global warming is strong, but the question of what to do about it remains controversial. Economics, sociology, and politics are all important factors in planning for the future.
Even if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases (GHGs) today, the Earth would still warm by another degree Fahrenheit or so. But what we do from today forward makes a big difference. Depending on our choices, scientists predict that the Earth could eventually warm by as little as 2.5 degrees or as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit.
A commonly cited goal is to stabilize GHG concentrations around 450-550 parts per million (ppm), or about twice pre-industrial levels. This is the point at which many believe the most damaging impacts of climate change can be avoided.
Current concentrations are about 380 ppm, which means there isn't much time to lose. According to the IPCC, we'd have to reduce GHG emissions by 50% to 80% of what they're on track to be in the next century to reach this level.
Is this possible?
Many people and governments are already working hard to cut greenhouse gases, and everyone can help.
Researchers Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow at Princeton University have suggested one approach that they call "stabilization wedges."
This means reducing GHG emissions from a variety of sources with technologies available in the next few decades, rather than relying on an enormous change in a single area. They suggest 7 wedges that could each reduce emissions, and all of them together could hold emissions at approximately current levels for the next 50 years, putting us on a potential path to stabilize around 500 ppm.
There are many possible wedges, including improvements to energy efficiency and vehicle fuel economy (so less energy has to be produced), and increases in wind and solar power, hydrogen produced from renewable sources, biofuels (produced from crops), natural gas, and nuclear power. There is also the potential to capture the carbon dioxide emitted from fossil fuels and store it underground—a process called "carbon sequestration."
In addition to reducing the gases we emit to the atmosphere, we can also increase the amount of gases we take out of the atmosphere. Plants and trees absorb CO2 as they grow, "sequestering" carbon naturally. Increasing forestlands and making changes to the way we farm could increase the amount of carbon we're storing.
Some of these technologies have drawbacks, and different communities will make different decisions about how to power their lives, but the good news is that there are a variety of options to put us on a path toward a stable climate.
The Arctic can be a harsh and unforgiving environment. It can be particularly tough on polar bear mothers, which fast for at least four months while they give birth to and suckle their cubs in dens they have hollowed out of snowdrifts. Accordingly, in the time before they enter those dens, they gorge, packing on the pounds to see them through the lean times ahead. And when they emerge, they are understandably keen to replenish themselves, and encourage their occasionally recalcitrant youngsters to pick up the pace on their way to the sea ice.
Sometimes, a polar bear will give birth to one cub, sometimes three, most often two. Sometimes, however, the demands are just too great: Lacking the energy to see the pregnancy to its conclusion, a mother's body may reabsorb the fetus or fetuses, allowing her to emerge, resume feeding and, come spring, mate once more; on occasion - how frequently is unknown - she may give birth but be so malnourished that she is forced to eat one or more of her offspring.
A new study in the journal Nature Communications has shown that the size of a litter - and the likelihood of reproductive success - is strongly correlated to the amount of weight that a pregnant female is able to accumulate prior to entering the den. The greater the amount of fat, the larger the energy store to sustain her and her cubs. Of course, the less time the female has to eat, the less opportunity she has to build up that energy store - and, in parts of their range, polar bears have less time to eat than in the past.
Peter Molnar of the University of Alberta and colleagues studied the bears of western Hudson Bay in Canada, which is at the southern edge of the polar bear's range. Every summer, the sea ice in Hudson Bay melts completely, obliging the bears to come ashore, where they await the ice's return in a state of "walking hibernation." That means the fast lasts even longer for pregnant bears there than elsewhere, giving them an even smaller window in which to stock up their energy supplies.
Unfortunately, Molnar and colleagues write, sea ice in western Hudson Bay is breaking up earlier in the summer, and polar bears are forced ashore one to two weeks earlier than was the case in the early 1990s. Given predicted temperature increases as a result of greenhouse gas emissions, by mid-century the average date on which bears will come ashore is estimated to be the 1st of July - one month earlier than twenty years ago.
The authors note that, in the early 1990s, 28 percent of pregnant bears in western Hudson Bay failed to produce any cubs; they calculate that, forced to come ashore a month earlier, between 40 and 73 percent will be unable to raise a litter. Furthermore, the average size of the litters born will also decrease. Should sea ice break up fully two months earlier, they estimate that at least 55 percent, and perhaps 100 percent, of pregnant females will be unable to give birth.
Not surprisingly, they note that "the litter size predictions provided in this study serve as another indicator that the western Hudson Bay population will probably not remain viable under predicted climatic conditions."
Although the Hudson Bay polar bears are especially vulnerable to the impacts of climate change on sea ice, Geoff York, of the World Wildlife Fund's Arctic Program, argues that their fate is relevant for polar bears elsewhere.
"Climate change is fundamentally altering long held assumptions for wildlife management," York - who has studied polar bears extensively but was not involved in the Nature Communications study. "The circumstance for polar bears is both dynamic and complex and will require solutions that understand regional differences and embrace adaptation. There are 19 sub-populations of polar bears across the Arctic and this paper presents one of what will be many different stories unfolding as conditions change."
The Arctic's summer ice coverage could hold its ground or even bounce back slightly, even as global average temperatures rise. But like a Guns 'n' Roses tour, the comeback will be short lived and eventually doomed to disappear. A computer climate model created by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) found that in some of the runs of the simulation, Arctic summer sea ice actually halted its retreat or even expanded for a decade or so. But in the long run, climate change won out and most of the summer ice melted away completely within 50 to 60 years.
“One of the results that surprised us all was the number of computer simulations that indicated a temporary halt to the loss of the ice,” said NCAR scientist Jennifer Kay, the lead author of the research, which was recently published in Geophysical Research Letters. The National Science Foundation funded the study.
“The computer simulations suggest that we could see a 10-year period of stable ice or even an increase in the extent of the ice. Even though the observed ice loss has accelerated over the last decade, the fate of sea ice over the next decade depends not only on human activity but also on climate variability that cannot be predicted,” said Kay.
The Earth's climate has always been a complex system influenced by many factors. The effects of human activities make the system even more complex and harder to predict. That is part of the reason why no computer simulation ever returns the same results for every run of the program.
“The changing Arctic climate is complicating matters,” Kay said. “We can’t measure natural variability now, because when temperatures warm and the ice thins, the ice variability changes and is not entirely natural.”
To look at the short and long term trends, the scientists used the recent version of the most powerful climate modeling software in the world, the Community Climate System Model.
Accuracy of future predictions was checked by running simulations of the late 20th century. The Model replicated the events of the past well enough to suggest that its forecasts of possible futures are realistic.
The simulations may say a comeback is possible, but reality shows it won't be this year. July 2011 set a monthly record for minimum sea ice extent, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
“When you start looking at longer-term trends, 50 or 60 years, there’s no escaping the loss of ice in the summer,” Kay said.
IMAGE 1: Melt water collecting in ponds on the surface of Arctic ice. The darker coloration absorbs more heat and causes further melting. (NASA, July 12, 2011)
IMAGE 2: This map and graph show that Artic ice is melting for longer periods of time each year. (NASA, Wikimedia Commons)
Human may define a geological period in the way dinosaurs -- and their vanishing act -- helped mark the Jurassic. Dinosaurs were most likely wiped out by a giant meteor that cooled Earth's temperatures below their threshold for survival. Humans, by contrast, have been the main architects of the enormous changes that are threatening to throw Earth out of whack.
If alien geologists were to visit our planet 10 million years from now, would they discern a distinct human fingerprint in Earth's accumulating layers of rock and sediment?
Will Homo sapiens, in other words, define a geological period in the way dinosaurs -- and their vanishing act -- helped mark the Jurassic and the Cretaceous?
A growing number of scientists, some gathered at a one-day symposium this week at the British Geological Society in London, say "yes".
One among them, chemistry Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen, has even suggested a new name: the Anthropocene. Whether this "age of man" will be short or long is unknown, says Crutzen, who shared his Nobel for unmasking the man-made chemicals eating away at the atmosphere's protective ozone layer.
For the first time in Earth's 4.7-billion-year history, a single species has not only radically changed Earth's morphology, chemistry and biology, it is now aware of having done so.
"We broke it, we bought it, we own it," is how Erle Ellis, a professor of geography and ecology at the University of Maryland at Baltimore, put it. "We don't know what is going to happen in the Anthropocene -- it could be good, even better," he said. "But we need to think differently and globally, to take ownership of the planet."
Dinosaurs were most likely wiped out by a giant meteor that cooled Earth's temperatures below their threshold for survival.
An analogous fate could await humans if temperatures climb by five or six degrees Celsius, which climate scientists say could happen within a century.
But dinosaurs thrived for more than 150 million years before a cosmic pebble ended their extraordinary run, while modern humans have only been around for about 200,000 years, a snap of the fingers by comparison.
Another key difference: dinosaurs didn't know what hit them, and played no role in their own demise.
Humans, by contrast, have been the main architects of the enormous changes that are threatening to throw what scientists now call the Earth System out of whack.
Since Crutzen coined the term a decade ago, the Anthropocene has been eagerly adopted by scientists across a broad spectrum of disciplines.
"It triggered the realization that we were in an entirely new era of planet Earth," said Will Steffen, head of Australian National University's Climate Change Institute.
It also triggered fierce debate.
At one level, the issues are narrow to the point of pedantry -- rock experts quibbling over whether mankind's present and future geological imprint merits recognition by the International Commission on Stratigraphy. At the same time, however, the concept forces us to ponder whether humanity's outsized impact on the planet could lead to undesired, possibly uncontrollable, outcomes, and what, if anything, humanity should do about it.
That leaves scientists who may be more comfortable classifying rocks than rocking the boat in a tricky position. For now, the man in the hot seat is University of Leicester professor Jan Zalasiewicz, who heads the group of geologists tasked with recommending whether the Anthropocene should be added to the 150-odd eons, eras, periods, epochs and ages into which the last 3.6 billion years of Earth's history has been officially divided.
"Jan must recognize the implications for society if his own tribe decides, using classical criteria, that there is not yet enough evidence to formally recognize a new boundary in the geological record," said Bryan Lovell, president of the British Geological Society and a professor at Cambridge.
Evidence of abrupt change -- on a geological time scale -- wrought by human hands would seem to be overwhelming.
The burning of fossil fuels has altered the composition of the atmosphere, pushing the concentration of carbon dioxide to levels unseen at least for 800,000 years, perhaps for three million.
The resulting global warming has itself set in motion other planetary-scale changes: massive melting of the parts of Earth normally covered by ice and snow (aka the cryosphere), and the acidification of the oceans.
Past shifts in the biosphere -- the realm of the living -- show up in sediment and rock, especially mass extinctions that have seen up to 90 percent of all lifeforms disappear within the geological blink of an eye.
There have been five such wipeouts over the last half billion years, and most scientists agree that we have now entered the sixth, with species disappearing at 100 to 1,000 times the so-called "background" rate. Another key index is the rise of invasive species traveling in a globalized world via ship ballasts, air travel and old-fashioned smuggling.
"The mass homogenization event" -- finding the same species everywhere -- "will be quite a clear signal in the archaeological record a million years from now," said Zalasiewicz.
Even the planet's outer skin, or lithosphere, has been transformed."We are sculpting the surface of the Earth," said James Syvitski, a professor at the University of Colorado, pointing to two centuries of industrial-scale mining, damming, deforestation and agriculture.
Thousands of dams built since the mid-19th century have "completely altered the planet's terrestrial plumbing," he said.
To validate the Anthropocene, all these changes will be measured against the range of variation in our current geological period -- the Holocene epoch -- which began some 12,000 years ago as Earth emerged from the last ice age.
"Human influence on the global environment must push the Earth system well beyond the Holocene envelope of variability," said Steffen.
By one key measure, at least, we already have: the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere -- measured in parts per million -- remained in a narrow range of 260 to 285 for nearly 12,000 years. Today is stands at 390 ppm, and is sure to rise considerably higher in coming decades.
If the hugely complex web of chemical and biological interactions that sustains most life does tip seriously out of kilter, the planet will find a new equilibrium, as it has in the past.
Earth, in other words, will do fine. Humans, on the other hand, may find the transition more than difficult.
"It is a planet that will be much warmer, much stormier, much less biodiverse," said Steffen. "We will need to be very resilient as a species."
In nailing down the Anthropocene, there is also a question of timing. Some scholars favor dating it to the start of agriculture, some 8,000 years ago.
Most, however, favor hammering the "golden spike" in the middle of the 19th century when the steam engine and then fossil fuels kicked off an exponential explosion in population and consumption that is still gathering pace. Starting around 1950, the "Great Acceleration" has seen dozens of key indicators, plotted on a graph, take off like a rocket: population, damming of rivers, water and fertilizer use, paper consumption, tourism, and vehicles, to name a few.
These, in turn, have sparked correspondingly sharp rises in greenhouse gas concentrations, ozone depletion, great floods, depletion of fisheries, loss of forests, species loss.
The dramatic transformation we have seen so far has been driven mainly by the 20 percent of the world's population living in rich nations.
Crutzen said he hopes that putting a name -- the Anthropocene -- to these changes may help focus humanity's mind on the challenges ahead.
"It could well be a paradigm shift in scientific thinking," he said at the London meeting. "But it will probably take another 20 years before it is formally accepted."
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