When it comes to climate, we are in a time of extremes, growing concern, and denial
The year 2017 was a year of more warming, more rapid melting of ice sheets, and extreme weather events from hurricanes and flooding to drought and wildfires. There were major advancements in climate research, and the percentage of Americans “very worried” about climate change reached a record high. Nonetheless, the administration in Washington took aggressive action to dismantle regulations to combat the problem. Citing “reckless language in the nuclear realm” and a rejection of “evidence-based assessments regarding climate,” the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists pushed the Doomsday Clock closer to midnight, sending a message that global threats were greater than they had been since the height of the Cold War.
In an article about the state of the climate one year into the Trump presidency, the New York Times writes that scientists are sounding the following warning:
“We’ve reached the point on climate change where a holding pattern is no longer sufficient to give us a decent shot at stabilizing global temperatures this century and avoiding irreversible changes to Earth’s weather patterns, polar caps and fragile ecosystems. It won’t be enough for emissions in the United States and other major economies to flatline or decline slowly in the years ahead. They need to fall sharply to nearly zero by midcentury. Even a few years of delay could make that task much harder.”
The US South will be especially hard hit by climage change. The Climate Impact Lab plans to refine its research to provide impact details at the county level to help local officials better prepare for the impacts–see below.
Inside Climate News has a good summary of research findings in 2017.
More warming, more melting: March of climate change continues
Last year was the third warmest on record and the warmest year not influenced by El Nino in the tropical Pacific Ocean. Temperatures in the warmest years—2016 and 2015—were boosted by strong El Nino events. Last year was 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th century average of 57 degrees.
In the US last year there were 16 extreme weather events with losses greater than $1 billion each: 8 severe storms, 3 tropical cyclones, 2 major floods, 1 extreme freeze event, and 1 major wildfire. The events caused deaths of 362 people and major economic impacts in the affected areas. The total cost exceeded $300 billion, a record for one year.
The steady upward trend in global temperatures is associated with a rise in greenhouse gas concentrations, with 2017 seeing “record high global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and the biggest recorded surge in CO₂ levels,” according to scientists at the University of Melbourne in Australia. The rise comes after a two-year plateau in global emissions. The global increase in emissions occurred as America’s carbon-dioxide emissions fell to the lowest level in 25 years, though emissions are expect to rise slightly in 2018.
Considering the global rise in emissions, Inside Climate News quotes Colorado State University climate scientist Scott Denning on the urgent need to cut emissions:
“It’s somewhat tempting to be complacent and say emissions have flattened out, but having them flatten out at that level is not going to help us. We’ve got to cut emissions by half in the next decade and by half again in the next two decades, as well. The fact that it’s going up is like a red flashing light on the dashboard.”
In view of the continued record warming, the Royal Society warned that heat waves represent “a deadly tragedy in the making” for the world’s most vulnerable populations. The society said recent reports may have underestimated the impacts of warming.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/12112017/climate-change-carbon-co2-emissions-record-high-2017-cop23 https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/201713 https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2671/long-term-warming-trend-continued-in-2017-nasa-noaa/ https://theconversation.com/2017-is-set-to-be-among-the-three-hottest-years-on-record-86934
National Climate Assessment summarizes major research
Climate change impacts are being felt around the world—including extreme climate events in the US—more than ever, and continuing greenhouse gas emissions at the current rate will bring more severe impacts in the coming decades. That is the conclusion of the “Climate Science Special Report” released as part of the National Climate Assessment (NCA) last December.
The global mean temperature increased by 1.2 degrees F. from 1951 to 2010, with more than 90% of the increase attributed to human activity. “There is no convincing alternative explanation” to observed warming other than climate change, the report says. In its annual report, the American Meteorological Society agreed, saying that recent extreme weather events would not have occurred without the emissions of greenhouse gases.
Understanding the human fingerprint on climate change is strengthened by recent “detection and attribution” studies. (See below.)
The NCA report says that, without significant emission reductions, warming since preindustrial times could reach 9 degrees F. by the end of the century. Significant reductions in emissions could limit the warming to 3.6 degrees F. or less. The global concentration of carbon dioxide has surpassed 400 parts per million, the highest level in 3 million years—a time when global temperature and sea level were much higher than today.
“The magnitude of climate change beyond the next few decades,” the report says, “will depend primarily on the amount of greenhouse gases (especially carbon dioxide) emitted globally.”
“There is broad consensus that the further and the faster the Earth system is pushed toward warming, the greater the risk of unanticipated changes and impacts, some of which are potentially large and irreversible,” the NCA report says.
In addition to atmospheric warming, global climate change is causing rising ocean temperatures and acidification and melting of sea ice, glaciers, and mountain snow covers.
The Climate Change Special Report highlights these climate changes:
- Global average sea level has risen by 7-8 inches since 1900, with close to half of that rise occurring in the last 25 years. Since 1900 the rate of rise has been greater than during any previous century in at least 2,800 years. Seas will continue to rise globally—by 1-4 feet by 2100 and, possibly, 8 feet. In the US, the Atlantic Coasts and Gulf Coasts will experience higher sea level rise than the global average.
- Heavy rainfall has increased in intensity and frequency and will continue this trend in the coming decades. Increasingly, extreme rainfall will affect human health, water quality and quantity, infrastructure, natural ecosystems, and agriculture.
- Since the 1960s in the US, heatwaves have become more frequent and extreme cold temperatures less frequent. From 1901 to 2016, average temperature in the US has increased by 1.8 degrees F. and is projected to increase by 2.5 degrees in the next three decades.
- Large forest fires have become more frequent since 1980 in the western US and Alaska and the trend is expected to continue, profoundly affecting ecosystems. Extreme droughts are affecting water resources and will continue to do so in the coming decades. Without reductions in emissions and improvements in the management of water resources, severe and long-term droughts could severely reduce water resources.
The NCA, the product of 13 federal agencies, “is the most comprehensive assessment of climate science currently available in the world, and it reaffirms what we’ve already known,” said Robert Kopp, one of the lead authors of the report and a professor of climate science at Rutgers University, told the Atlantic magazine. “If we want to do something like stay under 2 degrees Celsius of warming, the window to do that is closing in the next couple decades.”
https://science2017.globalchange.gov/
Trump administration ignores climate report
The Climate Science Special Report—to state the obvious—has not served as a guide to policy making in the Trump administration. Trump’s top environmental officers—the administrator of the EPA and the Secretary of the Interior—have ignored the report’s warnings as they work relentlessly to dismantle environmental regulations and programs to address climate change and protect pristine natural lands from the assaults of extraction and development.
EPA administrator repeals Clean Power Plan
In October EPA administrator Scott Pruitt announced that he was repealing the Clean Power Plan, President Obama’s major action to reduce heat-trapping emissions from the electric power sector. Pruitt has deep and long-standing connections to the oil industry and to conservative organizations funded by the Koch brothers. As Oklahoma attorney general, he worked closely with oil industry executives in crafting a slew of lawsuits aimed at blocking Obama’s “overreach” in setting environmental regulations deemed harmful to the industry.
Trump withdraws from Paris climate agreement
In the political realm, the big climate change story of 2017 was President Trump’s announcement in May that he is withdrawing the US from the Paris climate agreement. “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” the president said.
Pittsburg Mayor William Peduto responded: “As the Mayor of Pittsburgh, I can assure you that we will follow the guidelines of the Paris Agreement for our people, our economy and future.” Many other mayors responded with similar statements of their continued commitment to action to reduce emissions and increase renewable energy. In reaching the Paris goals, explained Austin Mayor Steve Adler, “So much of what’s required happens at the local level.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont declared that “Trump’s decision to withdraw the US from the Paris climate agreement is an abdication of American leadership and an international disgrace.”
Trump received praise from some—but not all—fellow Republicans. “This administration is prioritizing the bottom line of hard-working Americans over the agendas of environmental extremists,” said James M. Inhofe, senator from Oklahoma.
Push to “lease and develop” public lands could face legal obstacles
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, as the New York Times notes in a recent article, “has spent the past year making bold policy proclamations to advance President Trump’s energy agenda: He would open coastal waters to drilling, shrink national monuments, lift Obama-era fossil fuel regulations and reduce wildlife protections.”
Elizabeth Kolbert writes about Secretary Zinke in her Jan. 22 New Yorker article, “The Damage Done by Trump’s Department of the Interior.” She quotes Jim Lyons, a Deputy Assistant Secretary at the Interior Department during the Obama Administration: “They’re determined to lease and develop every acre they possibly can, which will minimize the potential for conserving these landscapes in the future,”, told the Washington Post. “They’re quite efficient, and they know exactly what they want to do.” Some of Trump’s actions may be reversed by future administrations, Kolbert writes. “But the destruction of the country’s last unspoiled places is a loss that can never be reversed.”
According to legal experts contacted by the Times, in its haste the Trump administration has opened itself to possible legal obstacles to achieving its anti-environmental goals. Secretary Zenke’s decision to exempt Florida from the plan to expand off-shore drilling could be especially problematic, as it was widely seen as a move to help Gov. Scott in his run for the Senate. In the past Gov. Scott has been a staunch proponent of drilling in and off the shores of Florida, including opposition to a ban proposed after the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
nytimes.com/2018/01/31/climate/trump-zinke-environmental-rollback.html
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/22/the-damage-done-by-trumps-department-of-the-interior
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/rick-scott-offshore-oil-drilling-senate_us_5a54fb3ae4b0efe47ebd665a
350 Pensacola joins fossil fuel-free campaign
350 Pensacola has joined with hundreds of other affiliates of 350.org around the world in a campaign to stop new coal, oil and gas projects and “build clean energy for all.” The campaign seeks to build a future of 100% renewable energy.
Following Trump’s State of the Union address on Jan. 30, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont helped to kick off the campaign for states and cities to speed the transition to clean energy. Sanders urged people to become climate activists and also to get involved in the political process, including running for local and state office.
“Trust me. I work in the Senate. I know, and you can do it,” Sanders said.
Detection and Attribution of Global Temperature Changes
Detection and attribution studies are a major new focus in climate research. In simple terms, detection and attribution studies seek to understand observed climate changes as having a human “fingerprint”—that is, they are significantly different from changes driven by natural variability alone and they are consistent with estimated changes caused by a combination of anthropogenic and natural forcing but not with alternative explanations of observed climate changes. In other words, we humans who burn fossil fuels and cut down our forests are forcing a rise in global temperatures and a variety of changes brought on by the warming. See the graph below showing that the human influence has resulted in much greater warming than would have occurred without that influence.
https://science2017.globalchange.gov/chapter/3/
More melting than in past 1500 years
NOAA’s Arctic Report Card for 2017 reported that the current “extent and rate of sea ice decline in the Arctic is unprecedented over at least the past 1,500 years.” While sea ice has contracted in the past, the current warming of ocean temperatures and resulting melting is unprecedented. Current rate and extent of melting “is beyond the range of natural variability, implying a human component to the drastic decrease observed in the records,” NOAA said.
NOAA reported that the Arctic has reached a ‘new normal’ of higher permafrost temperatures and thinner and less extensive sea ice.
Warming is melting permafrost faster
Permafrost, which is ground that remains frozen for two or more years, covers close to six million square miles, mostly in the Siberian region of Russia, Canadian Arctic, Greenland, and Alaska. Global warming is slowly melting permafrost, and that melting releases large amounts of carbon in the form of carbon dioxide and methane. Melting permafrost is a significant feedback as it is both an effect and a cause of warming.
New research published in 2017 find that the melting of permafrost is occurring faster than previously thought.
A study published last April in Nature Climate Change provides strong support for limiting warming at least to the level of the Paris climate accord. The researchers concluded that a 2-degree increase would cause the melting of 40% of the total permafrost, while a 1.5 degree increase would reduce that thawing by 30%. The point is that a significant cut in greenhouse gas emissions is essential if we are to avoid the runaway consequences of warming.
Scientists estimate that 5-15% of the carbon stored in permafrost could be released this century. While less than the emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, this amount is close to the amount of emissions from deforestation.
Woods Hole Research Center, a climate change think tank in Massachusetts, warns of the potential danger of melting permafrost: “Locked within ancient frozen soils, known as permafrost, is more than twice the carbon than has been emitted through fossil fuel combustion to date. The potential release of greenhouse gases from thawing permafrost constitutes a major global threat.”
http://whrc.org/our-work/research-program-areas/arctic/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/11/climate/climate-change-warming-permafrost.html
https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3262
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/12/arctic-permafrost-sea-ice-thaw-climate-change-report
https://www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/the-global-dangers-of-melting-permafrost/2500034.article
Beavers working to destroy the Arctic
There is new evidence that a small part of the problem of melting permafrost could be beavers. As the waters warm, these large semiaquatic rodents move into Arctic’s melting tundra and build dams, as they do throughout their range in the US. The dams create new channels for water to move into the permafrost, thus causing greater thawing.
The study of how beavers may be increasing the destruction of the Arctic was presented by Dr. Ken Tape at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in December. To be clear, beavers are doing nothing to push humans off the top position as the main culprits in climate change.
Big cuts in emissions now could keep sea rise to less than two feet this century
New models of Antarctic ice sheet melting emphasize how different levels of greenhouse gas emissions will affect sea-level rise. Aggressive cuts in emissions could prevent seas from rising more than two feet, while continued high emissions could result in several more feet of sea-level rise. Antarctic melting contributes more to rising seas than all other factors combined.
The 2014 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which assumed stable Antarctic ice sheets, projected a sea-level rise of 2 feet 6 inches. The new models, which consider evidence of greater melting, project a much higher sea-level rise of 4 feet 9 inches.
Robert Kopp of Rutgers University and Climate Central scientists warn of the possibility of “runaway risks” from sea-level rise in the second half of the century as a result of current levels of greenhouse gas emissions.
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/antarctic-modeling-pushes-up-sea-level-rise-projections-21776
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2017EF000663/abstract
Sea-level rise science seeks to refine local variations
Scientists understand global sea-level rise better than they do local and regional changes in the seas, and that is spurring new research to help understand better the mechanisms involved in local changes. Sea-level rise is caused by thermal expansion and the melting of ice sheets and glaciers. Other factors operate at the local level, including vertical land movements, tides, and storms. As a result, regional changes can vary by up to 7 inches from global sea-level rise.
NASA is developing new methods of using satellite observations to better understand regional sea-level rise and help state and local officials plan for higher seas. Knowing the measure of global sea-level rise may not help local public officials in making decisions about infrastructure such as roads and utilities as well as coastal businesses and residential developments.
“Scientists are responsible for helping society,” says a NASA blog on projecting regional changes. “This is why decision makers and scientists have come together to co-produce actionable science, to discuss how to communicate and collaborate, and to ensure that sea level science is being understood by the adaptation community.”
https://climate.nasa.gov/blog/2611/the-next-big-question-in-sea-level-science/
The South’s economy will be especially hard hit by climate change
When Trump announced the withdrawal from the Paris climate accords, he justified the decision by proclaiming that meeting the agreement’s emission reduction targets would result in “lost jobs, lower wages, shuttered factories, and vastly diminished economic production.” It is common for people who reject the findings of climate science to claim that combating climate change is too costly.
The weight of evidence suggests that we should take more seriously the costs of failing to act to combat climate change. In a new study in the journal Science, researchers analyzed the economic harm that climate change could inflict on the United States in the coming century. The study, considered by many observers to be ground-breaking, assumes a business-as-usual continuation of greenhouse gas emissions.
“In terms of overall effects on gross domestic product, the authors predict negative impacts in the southern United States and positive impacts in some parts of the Pacific Northwest and New England,” according to the abstract of the Science article.
The study looked at damage of climate change in agriculture, crime, coastal storms, energy, human mortality and labor. Researchers concluded that, in all these sectors, each 1 degree C. rise in temperature will cost about 1.2% of gross domestic product.
“Risk is distributed unequally across locations, generating a large transfer of value northward and westward that increases economic inequality,” the authors write. “By the late 21st century, the poorest third of counties are projected to experience damages between 2 and 20% of county income under business-as-usual emissions.”
Poor counties in the South will be particularly hard hit because they are most likely already close to dangerous heat thresholds. When summer high temperatures reach 95 degrees or higher, there is a drop in productivity and a rise in crime. Many poor counties in the South are at the brink of these dangerous temperatures so that a small increase will have a big impact.
Florida can expect to face economic damage from rising temperatures as well as rising seas. The map below (reproduced from Climate Central) shows the impacts each county can expect in the last two decades of the century. Escambia County could see a reduction in gross domestic product of 5-10%, while Santa Rosa and other nearby counties can expect even greater economic loses.
If global greenhouse gas emissions are greatly reduced, the projections of economic loss could be lower.
The researchers at the Climate Impact Lab, which conducted the study, plan to expand their model to include more potential impacts and provide a detailed view of what individual counties can expect so policymakers can begin to prepare far in advance.