Category: Global Warming

bookmark_borderCities Sink Faster Than Seas Rise

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Are sea levels rising due to global warming? Yes. Coastal cities are getting a double whammy.

NASA reports: a review article published by a team of scientists who recently assembled in New Orleans, La., and in Venice, Italy, to examine the problem. Extraction of groundwater or fossil fuels, and sometimes simply generations of farming, are causing large metropolitan areas in coastal zones around the world to subside surprisingly quickly—making the relative rise of adjacent seas an even greater potential hazard.

“Sea level rise is a problem, and subsidence is a huge problem, too,” said Cathleen Jones, a researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena who specializes in such hazards and is a member of the New Orleans team.

“There are areas where it is happening more rapidly than sea level rise,” she said. “I think it is not fully appreciated how much greater subsidence is in some of these areas, and how much it contributes to the loss of wetlands.”

Rapid subsidence makes many of these areas more vulnerable to the effects of climate change, especially those at elevations less than 10 meters (33 feet) above sea level. Several of these qualify as “megacities,” with populations greater than 10 million.

The most threatened: large river deltas, home to an estimated 500 million people. The fastest subsidence rate, 250 millimeters or nearly 10 inches per year, was seen in China’s Huanghe Delta. Southeast Asia saw 30 to 60 millimeters (1.2 to 2.4 inches) per year, while Katrina-ravaged portions of New Orleans saw rates as high as 35 millimeters (1.4 inches) per year.

The article, published in July 2016 in Earth and Space Science News, reports the group’s findings from New Orleans, where they held the first of two workshops. The city is part of the subsiding Mississippi Delta, a cause of wetland loss and the degradation of barrier islands, which, in turn, poses a threat to coastal ecosystems—as well as risks to human populations and infrastructure. Groundwater extraction and drainage of peat-rich soils, the article says, are to blame.
Dropping delta

The Sacramento River Bay Delta, though not mentioned in the report, is another site of severe subsidence, Jones said.

“It’s a bigger problem than sea level rise in the Sacramento delta,” she said. “Subsidence is largely driven there by the lowering water table. You have crops to grow; whenever you dry out soil with high carbon content, it will oxidize. It gives off carbon dioxide, loses mass and compacts. There, sea level rise is just a minor influence on it at this time. I’m not saying to ignore it, but right now these areas are threatened more by subsidence.”

While both human and natural factors contribute to subsidence, the natural processes—apart from tectonic disturbances—mostly act over very long timescales. Human causes appear to be driving the most rapid subsidence rates.

Lead author Mead Allison of the Water Institute of the Gulf in Baton Rouge, Jones and the rest of the 12-member science team advocate the creation of “supersites” around the world, like the one being assembled in New Orleans, to track a variety of contributors to subsidence.

At these sites, remote sensing would be combined with ground sensor networks to track subsidence over years. In New Orleans, that has in the past included use of the interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) instrument aboard JPL’s Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) aircraft, gathering data there during 2009-2015.

“(We want) to try to start getting more of these supersites, where we try to differentiate all the different contributions,” Jones said. “So that instead of just measuring subsidence overall, we try to figure out what parts are sediment loading, what parts (are other factors). Whenever we know how much comes from each of these, we can begin to implement policy that would remediate the ones that are anthropogenic in origin.”

bookmark_borderCows Expel Gas So They Don’t Explode

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by Daniel Brouse

CALIFORNIA — “Quite frankly, we want them to expel gas so they don’t explode,” said Anja Raudabaugh, chief executive of Western United Dairymen.

The California dairy industry is fighting back against proposed regulations to curb greenhouse gas emitted by belching and farting cows. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, and the California Air Resources Board (ARB) has set a goal of reducing methane emissions. There are over five-and-half million cows in California.

“The focus here is to highlight ARB’s efforts at over-regulating the dairy industry,” said Anja Raudabaugh. “By nature’s design, cows pass lots of gas.”

The ARB proposes “improved manure management practices, new diets for cattle and gut microbial interventions.”

bookmark_borderRecord Temperatures

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NASA — Two key climate change indicators — global surface temperatures and Arctic sea ice extent — have broken numerous records through the first half of 2016, according to NASA analyses of ground-based observations and satellite data.

Each of the first six months of 2016 set a record as the warmest respective month globally in the modern temperature record, which dates to 1880, according to scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York. The six-month period from January to June was also the planet’s warmest half-year on record, with an average temperature 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.4 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the late nineteenth century.

Five of the first six months of 2016 also set records for the smallest respective monthly Arctic sea ice extent since consistent satellite records began in 1979, according to analyses developed by scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Maryland. The one exception, March, recorded the second smallest extent for that month.

While these two key climate indicators have broken records in 2016, NASA scientists said it is more significant that global temperature and Arctic sea ice are continuing their decades-long trends of change. Both trends are ultimately driven by rising concentrations of heat-trapping carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

The extent of Arctic sea ice at the peak of the summer melt season now typically covers 40 percent less area than it did in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Arctic sea ice extent in September, the seasonal low point in the annual cycle, has been declining at a rate of 13.4 percent per decade.

“While the El Niño event in the tropical Pacific this winter gave a boost to global temperatures from October onwards, it is the underlying trend which is producing these record numbers,” GISS Director Gavin Schmidt said.

Previous El Niño events have driven temperatures to what were then record levels, such as in 1998. But in 2016, even as the effects of the recent El Niño taper off, global temperatures have risen well beyond those of 18 years ago because of the overall warming that has taken place in that time.

The global trend in rising temperatures is outpaced by the regional warming in the Arctic, said Walt Meier, a sea ice scientist at NASA Goddard.

“It has been a record year so far for global temperatures, but the record high temperatures in the Arctic over the past six months have been even more extreme,” Meier said. “This warmth as well as unusual weather patterns have led to the record low sea ice extents so far this year.”

NASA tracks temperature and sea ice as part of its effort to understand the Earth as a system and to understand how Earth is changing. In addition to maintaining 19 Earth-observing space missions, NASA also sends researchers around the globe to investigate different facets of the planet at closer range. Right now, NASA researchers are working across the Arctic to better understand both the processes driving increased sea ice melt and the impacts of rising temperatures on Arctic ecosystems.

NASA’s long-running Operation IceBridge campaign last week began a series of airborne measurements of melt ponds on the surface of the Arctic sea ice cap. Melt ponds are shallow pools of water that form as ice melts. Their darker surface can absorb more sunlight and accelerate the melting process. IceBridge is flying out of Barrow, Alaska, during sea ice melt season to capture melt pond observations at a scale never before achieved. Recent studies have found that the formation of melt ponds early in the summer is a good predictor of the yearly minimum sea ice extent in September.

“No one has ever, from a remote sensing standpoint, mapped the large-scale depth of melt ponds on sea ice,” said Nathan Kurtz, IceBridge’s project scientist and a sea ice researcher at NASA Goddard. “The information we’ll collect is going to show how much water is retained in melt ponds and what kind of topography is needed on the sea ice to constrain them, which will help improve melt pond models.”

Operation IceBridge is a NASA airborne mission that has been flying multiple campaigns at both poles each year since 2009, with a goal of maintaining critical continuity of observations of sea ice and the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica.

At the same time, NASA researchers began in earnest this year a nearly decade-long, multi-faceted field study of Arctic ecosystems in Alaska and Canada. The Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) will study how forests, permafrost and other ecosystems are responding to rising temperatures in the Arctic, where climate change is unfolding faster than anywhere else on the planet.

ABoVE consists of dozens individual experiments that over years will study the region’s changing forests, the cycle of carbon movement between the atmosphere and land, thawing permafrost, the relationship between fire and climate change, and more.

bookmark_borderClimate Change, Extreme Weather and Toxic Crops

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by Daniel Brouse

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has released a report that examines how climate change is increasing the toxicity of crops.

Crop Toxicity
Extreme weather events, such as “drought and high temperatures, can trigger the accumulation in crops of chemical compounds that are toxic to animals and humans.”

The report goes on to say: Wheat, barley, maize (corn) and millet are among the crops most susceptible to nitrate accumulation, which is caused by prolonged drought. Acute nitrate poisoning in animals can lead to miscarriage, asphyxiation and death, ruining the lives of smallholder farmers and herders.

Heavy rains that break prolonged drought can also result in the dangerous accumulation of another toxic compound called hydrogen cyanide or prussic acid in crops like flax, maize, sorghum, arrow grass, cherries and apples.

Aflatoxins, which are fungal toxins that can cause cancer and stunt foetal growth, are another emerging problem in crops. The risk of aflatoxin contamination, especially in maize, is expected to increase in higher latitudes due to rising temperatures. A recent study predicts that this toxin will become a food safety issue for Europe, especially in the most likely scenario of a 2oC rise in global temperatures.

The report highlights two critical issues associated with climate change – loss and damage. Given the delays in the last 25 years in mitigating and adapting to climate change, scientific evidence suggests that losses and damages from climate change are inevitable, with profound consequences for ecosystems, people, assets and economies. This is already happening. The heat waves of 2003 are a good example of what happens when efforts to mitigate and adapt to changes in the climate fail: 30,000 people died, glaciers decreased, permafrost thawed and the European Union’s agricultural sector lost $14.7 billion.

bookmark_borderTemperature Reaches 123 Degrees in India

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The temperature went over 123 degrees (50C) in India. This was the highest temperature ever recorded in the country.

“Fishermen are advised not to venture into the sea along and off Tamil Nadu and Puducherry during the next 24 hours, along and off Andhra Pradesh coast during the next 48 hours and also and off the Odisha coast on 19th and 20th of May,” the IMD (India Meteorological Department) said in an advisory on Wednesday. –

Deutsche Welle reported, “The heat wave comes as India suffers its worst drought in decades, affecting around 330 million people. Drinking water is running short in many areas and poor rains have prompted the central government to send water trains to regions affected by drought. Hundreds of people have died and crops have been destroyed in several states.”

bookmark_borderAir Pollution Killing Millions

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by Daniel Brouse

It is estimated by the World Health Organization that 7 million people per year die as a result of air pollution. “According to the latest urban air quality database, 98% of cities in low- and middle income countries with more than 100,000 inhabitants do not meet WHO air quality guidelines. Over 80% of those living in urbanized regions with air-quality monitoring breathe air featuring pollution levels that exceed World Health Organization safety limits.”

“Air pollution is a major cause of disease and death. It is good news that more cities are stepping up to monitor air quality, so when they take actions to improve it they have a benchmark,” says Dr Flavia Bustreo, WHO Assistant-Director General, Family, Women and Children’s Health. “When dirty air blankets our cities the most vulnerable urban populations—the youngest, oldest and poorest—are the most impacted.”

“Urban air pollution continues to rise at an alarming rate, wreaking havoc on human health,” says Dr Maria Neira, WHO Director, Department of Public Health, Environmental and Social Determinants of Health.

“It is crucial for city and national governments to make urban air quality a health and development priority,” says WHO’s Dr Carlos Dora. “When air quality improves, health costs from air pollution-related diseases shrink, worker productivity expands and life expectancy grows. Reducing air pollution also brings an added climate bonus, which can become a part of countries’ commitments to the climate treaty.”

The problem was thought to be mostly a problem in cities; however, new research show that parts of the world with the most farming are a big problem, too. In the study by by scientists at NASA and several universities, it was found that emissions from farms are greater than all other industrial sources of particulate air pollution in the United States, Europe, Russia and China.

“What we found surprising is simply the large amount that is attributed to farming that leads to near-surface air pollution,” said Susanne Bauer, an atmospheric scientist at Columbia University and NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The largest U.S. impact is on the Northeastern United States “where nitrogen emissions from fertilizer and ammonia from animal waste combine with sulfates and nitrogen oxides from industries and automobiles.”

The article “Significant atmospheric aerosol pollution caused by world food cultivation” was published by Susan Bauer, Kostas Tsigaridis and Ron Miller:

Particulate matter is a major concern for public health, causing cancer and cardiopulmonary mortality. Therefore, governments in most industrialized countries monitor and set limits for particulate matter. To assist policy makers, it is important to connect the chemical composition and severity of particulate pollution to its sources. Here we show how agricultural practices, livestock production, and the use of nitrogen fertilizers impact near-surface air quality. In many densely populated areas, aerosols formed from gases that are released by fertilizer application and animal husbandry dominate over the combined contributions from all other anthropogenic pollution. Here we test reduction scenarios of combustion-based and agricultural emissions that could lower air pollution. For a future scenario, we find opposite trends, decreasing nitrate aerosol formation near the surface while total tropospheric loads increase. This suggests that food production could be increased to match the growing global population without sacrificing air quality if combustion emission is decreased.

More of the Human Induced Climate Change Experiment

bookmark_borderAntarctica: Melting Glacier Could See Sea Levels to Rise by 6 Feet

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In a new study by Imperial College of London, “current rates of climate change could trigger instability in a major Antarctic glacier, ultimately leading to more than 2m of sea-level rise.”

“The evidence coming together is painting a picture of East Antarctica being much more vulnerable to a warming environment than we thought,” said Professor Martin Siegert, Co-Director of the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London. “This is something we should worry about. Totten Glacier is losing ice now, and the warm ocean water that is causing this loss has the potential to also push the glacier back to an unstable place.”

“Totten Glacier is only one outlet for the ice of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, but it could have a huge impact. The East Antarctic Ice Sheet is by far the largest mass of ice on Earth, so any small changes have a big influence globally.”

bookmark_borderBillion People Face Global Flooding

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The BBC reports, a British aid charity is warning that by 2060 more than a billion people worldwide will live in cities at risk of catastrophic flooding as a result of climate change. A study by Christian Aid says the US, China and India are among the countries most threatened. It says the Indian cities of Kolkata and Mumbai will be most at risk.

The eight most vulnerable cities on the list are all in Asia, followed by Miami in the US. The report urges governments to take action to reduce global warming and invest in disaster reduction programs.

Dr Alison Doig, the report’s author, told the BBC World Service that people living in large coastal cities were particularly at risk.

“I think it’s cities like Kolkata, Dakar, the big mega-cities of the south and the emerging economies where the people are most vulnerable to exposure to sea-level rises and to higher rain events,” she said.

“Flooding in these cities can cause massive damage, but can also threaten life.”

“The whole of Florida is totally vulnerable,” she said.

“It is so low-lying, it is virtually swampland reclaimed. So significant climate change… raising water half to a full metre this century, will take out an awful lot of Florida and a significant amount of Miami.”

The study says that the priority should be to rapidly reduce carbon emissions and limit temperature increase by switching from fossil fuels to low-carbon energy.

It says vulnerable communities must be helped by better protecting homes and livelihoods.

The study also calls for international systems to help communities recover from devastating storms and floods.

Dr Doig warned that Florida was likely to suffer extensive flooding.

bookmark_borderAlaska Continues to Break Records

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NOAA reports:
During the first third of the year, January–April, the average temperature for the contiguous United States was 4.0 degrees F above the 20th-century average, making this period the second warmest on record. Alaska continues to break records for the warmest year to date on record, while 34 states across the West, Great Plains, Midwest and Northeast were much warmer than average. The year-to-date average precipitation total for the contiguous U.S. was 0.45 inch above the 20th-century average.

The BBC reports:
April was the seventh month in a row that broke global temperature records, NASA figures show.

Last month smashed the previous record for April by the largest margin ever, the data show.

That makes it three months in a row that the monthly record was broken by the largest margin ever.

But in terms of its departure from the 1951-1980 temperature average used by Nasa, April was equal with January 2016.

“All of these record breaking temperatures and attendant implications that we have had, such as record breaking fires for example, and droughts in India are all reminders that we cannot afford to do anything except to accelerate the solution agenda – we absolutely have no other option but to accelerate.”

bookmark_borderSea Level Rise Submerges Five Islands

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The Solomon Islands in the Pacific Ocean area disappearing due to climate change and the rising sea level. Sea-level rise, erosion and coastal flooding are the most devastating impacts of human induced global warming.

In Environmental Research Letters published by IOP Science, scientists have studied the effects of sea-level rise and waves:
Low-lying reef islands in the Solomon Islands provide a valuable window into the future impacts of global sea-level rise. Sea-level rise has been predicted to cause widespread erosion and inundation of low-lying atolls in the central Pacific. However, the limited research on reef islands in the western Pacific indicates the majority of shoreline changes and inundation to date result from extreme events, seawalls and inappropriate development rather than sea-level rise alone. Here, we present the first analysis of coastal dynamics from a sea-level rise hotspot in the Solomon Islands. Using time series aerial and satellite imagery from 1947 to 2014 of 33 islands, along with historical insight from local knowledge, we have identified five vegetated reef islands that have vanished over this time period and a further six islands experiencing severe shoreline recession. Shoreline recession at two sites has destroyed villages that have existed since at least 1935, leading to community relocations. Rates of shoreline recession are substantially higher in areas exposed to high wave energy, indicating a synergistic interaction between sea-level rise and waves. Understanding these local factors that increase the susceptibility of islands to coastal erosion is critical to guide adaptation responses for these remote Pacific communities. ( Simon Albert, Javier X Leon, Alistair R Grinham, John A Church, Badin R Gibbes and Colin D Woodroffe)