Tag: human induced

bookmark_borderThe Cumulative Costs of Climate Change

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“The crisis carries a profound warning. As climate change brings more frequent and intense storms, floods, heat waves, wildfires and other extreme events, it is placing growing stress on the foundations of the country’s economy: Its network of roads and railways, drinking-water systems, power plants, electrical grids, industrial waste sites and even homes. Failures in just one sector can set off a domino effect of breakdowns in hard-to-predict ways,” as reported by The New York Times in the article Texas Blackouts Point to Coast-to-Coast Crises Waiting to Happen.

“We are colliding with a future of extremes,” said Alice Hill, who oversaw planning for climate risks on the National Security Council during the Obama administration. “We base all our choices about risk management on what’s occurred in the past, and that is no longer a safe guide.”

“Sewer systems are overflowing more often as powerful rainstorms exceed their design capacity. Coastal homes and highways are collapsing as intensified runoff erodes cliffs. Coal ash, the toxic residue produced by coal-burning plants, is spilling into rivers as floods overwhelm barriers meant to hold it back. Homes once beyond the reach of wildfires are burning in blazes they were never designed to withstand.”

“I am extremely concerned by the lack of emergency-management expertise reflected in Biden’s climate team,” said Samantha Montano, an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy who focuses on disaster policy. “There’s an urgency here that still is not being reflected.”

A White House spokesman, Vedant Patel, said in a statement, “Building resilient and sustainable infrastructure that can withstand extreme weather and a changing climate will play an integral role in creating millions of good paying, union jobs” while cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

“All these issues are converging,” said Robert D. Bullard, a professor at Texas Southern University who studies wealth and racial disparities related to the environment. “And there’s simply no place in this country that’s not going to have to deal with climate change.”

bookmark_borderPermafrost

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For a longtime researches at The Membrane Domain have been conducting R&D on the exponential properties of climate change.

The melting of the permafrost has become a good example of the problem. A recent article in Nature Climate Change reports:

Decomposition of organic carbon from thawing permafrost soils and the resulting release of carbon to the atmosphere are considered to represent a potentially critical global-scale feedback on climate change. The accompanying heat production from microbial metabolism of organic material has been recognized as a potential positive-feedback mechanism that would enhance permafrost thawing and the release of carbon. This internal heat production is poorly understood, however, and the strength of this effect remains unclear3. Here, we have quantified the variability of heat production in contrasting organic permafrost soils across Greenland and tested the hypothesis that these soils produce enough heat to reach a tipping point after which internal heat production can accelerate the decomposition processes. Results show that the impact of climate changes on natural organic soils can be accelerated by microbial heat production with crucial implications for the amounts of carbon being decomposed. The same is shown to be true for organic middens5 with the risk of losing unique evidence of early human presence in the Arctic.

bookmark_borderWhy Doesn’t Global Warming Feel Warmer?

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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has released its Fifth Assessment Report (AR5). The report states that “warming of the climate system is unequivocal.”

Then, why doesn’t it feel that much hotter? Because most of the rise in temperature is in the water:

Ocean warming dominates the increase in energy stored in the climate system, accounting for more than 90% of the energy accumulated between 1971 and 2010 (high confidence). It is virtually certain that the upper ocean (0?700 m) warmed from 1971 to 2010, and it likely warmed between the 1870s and 1971.

• On a global scale, the ocean warming is largest near the surface, and the upper 75 m warmed by 0.11 [0.09 to 0.13] °C per decade over the period 1971–2010. Since AR4, instrumental biases in upper-ocean temperature records have been identified and reduced, enhancing confidence in the assessment of change.
• It is likely that the ocean warmed between 700 and 2000 m from 1957 to 2009. Sufficient observations are available for the period 1992 to 2005 for a global assessment of temperature change below 2000 m. There were likely no significant observed temperature trends between 2000 and 3000 m for this period. It is likely that the ocean warmed from 3000 m to the bottom for this period, with the largest warming observed in the Southern Ocean.
• More than 60% of the net energy increase in the climate system is stored in the upper ocean (0–700 m) during the relatively well-sampled 40-year period from 1971 to 2010, and about 30% is stored in the ocean below 700 m. The increase in upper ocean heat content during this time period estimated from a linear trend is likely.
• It is about as likely as not that ocean heat content from 0–700 m increased more slowly during 2003–2010 than during 1993–2002. Ocean heat uptake from 700–2000m, where interannual variability is smaller, likely continued unabated from 1993 to 2009.
• It is very likely that regions of high salinity where evaporation dominates have become more saline, while regions of low salinity where precipitation dominates have become fresher since the 1950s. These regional trends in ocean salinity provide indirect evidence that evaporationand precipitation over the oceans have changed (medium confidence).
• There is no observational evidence of a trend in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), based on the decade-long record of the complete AMOC and longer records of individual AMOC components.

bookmark_borderU.N.: Humans Induce Climate Change

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UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned that “we cannot accept a rising tide that floats only some boats and leaves many to drown.”

Ban Ki-moon has been taking a strong stance on global warming. His latest efforts include getting world leaders to admit humans are impacting climate change. Most people would think this is a given. No. In fact, quite a few government and business leaders refuse to admit to what science shows.

“Nobody can benefit from catastrophic climate change or rampant unemployment and the social unrest that comes with it,” Mr. Ban said.

UK newspaper The Independent says. “The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will say next week that certainty has increased from “very likely” to “extremely likely” that human activity has caused more than half of the observed temperature rise from 1951 to 2010, in a large part due to fossil fuels and deforestation.”

bookmark_borderBurn Scar

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Burn scar from fires in Minnesota

Nearly two months after being ignited by lightning, the Pagami Creek Fire in northern Minnesota was nearly contained when Landsat-5 acquired this image on October 10, 2011. Since August 18, the fire has been burning in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Superior National Forest. As of October 11, the fire had burned 92,682 acres and was 82 percent contained. Apart from a faint hint of smoke, there is little sign of current fire activity in the image. The burned forest, however, is charcoal-colored, in contrast to the green forest around it.

  1. Reference

  2. InciWeb. (2011, October 11). Pagami Creek Fire. Accessed October 11, 2011.

NASA Earth Observatory image created by Jesse Allen and Robert Simmon, using Landsat data provided by the United States Geological Survey. Caption by Holli Riebeek.

Instrument:
Landsat 5 – TM