Ice sheets melting faster than predicted

... causing a greater rate of sea-level rise:

The pace at which the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are melting is "accelerating rapidly" and raising the global sea level, according to findings of a study financed by NASA.

The findings suggest that the ice sheets - more so than ice loss from earth's mountain glaciers and ice caps - have become "the dominant contributor to global sea level rise, much sooner than model forecasts have predicted".

This study, published on Tuesday, the longest to date examining changes to polar ice sheet mass, combined two decades of monthly satellite measurements with regional atmospheric climate model data to study changes in mass.

Global Warning Climate Change Energy

The 90% chance we cause observed global warming now sits at 95%

The 2007 IPCC Summary Report reported a 90% likelihood that mankind's signature was in the currently experienced global warming, leaving the chances that nature was causing the warming estimated at 10%.

Now a new study by scientists at Britain's Met Office Hadley Centre, the University of Edinburgh, Melbourne University and Victoria University in Canada estimates that there was a less than 5 per cent likelihood that natural variations in climate were responsible for the changes:

The study said that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had understated mankind's overall contribution to climate change. The IPCC had said in 2007 that there was no evidence of warming in the Antarctic. However, the panel said the latest observations showed that man-made emissions were having an impact on even the remotest continent.

The panel assessed more than 100 recent peer-reviewed scientific papers and found that the overwhelming majority had detected clear evidence of human influence on the climate.

Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring and attribution at the Met Office, who led the study, said: "This wealth of evidence we have now shows there is an increasingly remote possibility of climate change being dominated by natural factors rather than human factors."

This has to send a message to those who would seek to delay action... doesn't it?

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Last 10 years period warmest on modern record

The AGW denier canard that the earth has been cooling since 1998 is taken apart by Seth Borenstein in AJC.

The case that the Earth might be cooling partly stems from recent weather. Last year was cooler than previous years. It's been a while since the super-hot years of 1998 and 2005. So is this a longer climate trend or just weather's normal ups and downs?

In a blind test, the AP gave temperature data to four independent statisticians and asked them to look for trends, without telling them what the numbers represented. The experts found no true temperature declines over time.

"If you look at the data and sort of cherry-pick a micro-trend within a bigger trend, that technique is particularly suspect," said John Grego, a professor of statistics at the University of South Carolina.

No more cherries now, deniers.

Global warming skeptics base their claims on an unusually hot year in 1998. Since then, they say, temperatures have dropped — thus, a cooling trend. But it's not that simple.

Since 1998, temperatures have dipped, soared, fallen again and are now rising once more. Records kept by the British meteorological office and satellite data used by climate skeptics still show 1998 as the hottest year. However, data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA show 2005 has topped 1998. Published peer-reviewed scientific research generally cites temperatures measured by ground sensors, which are from NOAA, NASA and the British, more than the satellite data.

The recent Internet chatter about cooling led NOAA's climate data center to re-examine its temperature data. It found no cooling trend.

"The last 10 years are the warmest 10-year period of the modern record," said NOAA climate monitoring chief Deke Arndt. "Even if you analyze the trend during that 10 years, the trend is actually positive, which means warming."

The AP sent expert statisticians NOAA's year-to-year ground temperature changes over 130 years and the 30 years of satellite-measured temperatures preferred by skeptics and gathered by scientists at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Statisticians who analyzed the data found a distinct decades-long upward trend in the numbers, but could not find a significant drop in the past 10 years in either data set. The ups and downs during the last decade repeat random variability in data as far back as 1880.

Saying there's a downward trend since 1998 is not scientifically legitimate, said David Peterson, a retired Duke University statistics professor and one of those analyzing the numbers.

Whammo, some ammo for the noggin of the next denier dumb enough to pull the "but, it's-cooling" caper on me. Some other useful links to load up on:

• Skeptical Science: Did global warming stop in 1988? (#8 in the Hottest Skeptical Arguments list). A great primer that also covers the role of oceans, and what happens if you remove the ENSO signal from the temperature record. That is, if you take the variable weather signal out of the climate signal.
• Coby Beck's How to talk to a climate skeptic: Warming stopped in 1988. Coby has broken down the various deniers' arguments into a fascinating taxonomy.

H/t: Climatespin

Global Warning Climate Change Energy

1 tonne of co2 equals 0.0000000000015 °C of global warming

From my unscientific understanding, if the latest findings of Damon Matthews, a professor in Concordia University's Department of Geography, Planning and the Environment bear out, then the public understanding of AGW will have it's smoking gun. Matthews and his colleagues claim to have found a direct relationship between carbon dioxide emissions and global warming.

The latest edition of Nature, June 11, 2009, published the findings from a combination of global climate models and historical climate data to show that there is a simple linear relationship between total cumulative emissions and global temperature change.

Science Daily reported:

Until now, it has been difficult to estimate how much climate will warm in response to a given carbon dioxide emissions scenario because of the complex interactions between human emissions, carbon sinks, atmospheric concentrations and temperature change. Matthews and colleagues show that despite these uncertainties, each emission of carbon dioxide results in the same global temperature increase, regardless of when or over what period of time the emission occurs.

These findings mean that we can now say: if you emit that tonne of carbon dioxide, it will lead to 0.0000000000015 degrees of global temperature change. If we want to restrict global warming to no more than 2 degrees, we must restrict total carbon emissions – from now until forever – to little more than half a trillion tonnes of carbon, or about as much again as we have emitted since the beginning of the industrial revolution.

"Most people understand that carbon dioxide emissions lead to global warming," says Matthews, "but it is much harder to grasp the complexities of what goes on in between these two end points. Our findings allow people to make a robust estimate of their contribution to global warming based simply on total carbon dioxide emissions."

Here's the Abstract:

The proportionality of global warming to cumulative carbon emissions

H. Damon Matthews¹, Nathan P. Gillett², Peter A. Stott³ & Kirsten Zickfeld²

Nature 459, 829-832 (11 June 2009) | doi:10.1038/nature08047

Abstract: The global temperature response to increasing atmospheric CO₂ is often quantified by metrics such as equilibrium climate sensitivity and transient climate response¹. These approaches, however, do not account for carbon cycle feedbacks and therefore do not fully represent the net response of the Earth system to anthropogenic CO₂ emissions. Climate–carbon modelling experiments have shown that: (1) the warming per unit CO₂ emitted does not depend on the background CO₂ concentration²; (2) the total allowable emissions for climate stabilization do not depend on the timing of those emissions^{3, 4, 5}; and (3) the temperature response to a pulse of CO₂ is approximately constant on timescales of decades to centuries^{3, 6, 7, 8}. Here we generalize these results and show that the carbon–climate response (CCR), defined as the ratio of temperature change to cumulative carbon emissions, is approximately independent of both the atmospheric CO₂ concentration and its rate of change on these timescales. From observational constraints, we estimate CCR to be in the range 1.0–2.1 °C per trillion tonnes of carbon (Tt C) emitted (5th to 95th percentiles), consistent with twenty-first-century CCR values simulated by climate–carbon models. Uncertainty in land-use CO₂ emissions and aerosol forcing, however, means that higher observationally constrained values cannot be excluded. The CCR, when evaluated from climate–carbon models under idealized conditions, represents a simple yet robust metric for comparing models, which aggregates both climate feedbacks and carbon cycle feedbacks. CCR is also likely to be a useful concept for climate change mitigation and policy; by combining the uncertainties associated with climate sensitivity, carbon sinks and climate–carbon feedbacks into a single quantity, the CCR allows CO₂-induced global mean temperature change to be inferred directly from cumulative carbon emissions.

More about Damon Matthews' work: Chasing climate change

Global Warning Climate Change Energy

Oceans cooling. Not.

A common misconception about measuring global warming, one that deniers prey upon, is that the average global temperature is the whole story. Ergo, if the last ten years of lower atmosphere temperatures plateau, the warming must have stopped, so the meme goes... on and on.

No so, according to Josh Willis, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who specialises in estimating how much heat the ocean stores annually:

"The oceans are absorbing more than 80 percent of the heat from global warming,” he says. "If you aren’t measuring heat content in the upper ocean, you aren’t measuring global warming."

And so goes a fascinating NASA Earth Observatory feature story of how a conundrum facing scientists, that climate models predicting rising ocean temperatures mismatched observations, was solved.

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Solar cost-prohibitive? Buckyballs to that

clipped from www.engadget.com Researchers develop "paint-on" solar cells The quest to builder a better, cheaper solar cell continues on, as researchers at the New Jersey Institute of Technology have developed a new type of solar cell that can be printed or painted onto flexible plastic sheets. Unlike traditional silicon cells, the print-on cells are composed of carbon nanotubes and buckyballs, which results in substantially cheaper manufacturing costs and greater efficiency, since apparently carbon nanotubes are terrific conductors. The scientists seem pretty pumped about the potential for their tech, with lead researcher Somenath Mitra quite confidently proclaiming that we'll all soon be printing " sheets of these solar cells with inexpensive home-based inkjet printers." Yeah, we're sure there won't be any shenanigans going on in that ink cartridge market. Global Warning Climate Change Energy

Royal Society: Hurricanes doubled over century

The dearly held tenants that the global warming denialists cling onto so tenaciously are disappearing faster than the Arctic ice-shelf.

The latest one to crumble is the notion that global warming does not increase the number and frequency of hurricanes.

clipped from news.bbc.co.uk A new analysis of Atlantic hurricanes says their numbers have doubled over the last century. This new study, published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in London, looks at the frequency of these storms from 1900 to the present and it says about twice as many form each year now compared to 100 years ago. The authors say that man-made climate change, which has increased the temperature of the sea surface, is the major factor behind the increase in numbers. "Over the period we've had natural variability in the frequency of storms, which has contributed less than 50% of the actual increase in our view," said Dr Greg Holland from the United States National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, who authored the report. "Approximately 60%, and possibly even 70% of what we are seeing in the last decade can be attributed directly to greenhouse warming," he said. Global Warning Climate Change Energy

Rich's carbon emissions doubles the poor's

The more we learn about the impact of global warming, the more it is apparent that the poor are going to bear the brunt of it.

We see that in Bangladesh. And in Australia. New research on carbon footprints across the socio-economic spectrum here, reveals that:

At a relatively low carbon price of $25 a tonne of greenhouse pollution, poor families around Australia would be paying about $558 a year more on their bills, while the wealthiest households would pay around $1446 extra.

But once those extra costs are adjusted to take into consideration income levels, as a proportion of their total spending, poor people could pay almost seven times more than the rich.

clipped from www.theage.com.au Unlike previous studies, the research for the Brotherhood of St Laurence takes into account the indirect greenhouse gas emissions from producing everyday goods and services, from food and clothes to watching television, drinking alcohol and catching a plane. The research found that wealthy, tertiary-educated households had by far the biggest "carbon footprint" in Australia, generating almost 58 tonnes of greenhouse pollution a year. In contrast, poor families were only responsible for 22 tonnes of emissions, with pensioners and people living on welfare also recording the lowest carbon footprints. The national average was 32 tonnes a year. The difference largely mirrors income, with the wealthiest households spending $1900 a week (excluding rent), while poor families spend just $468. The analysis was conducted by the Melbourne-based National Institute of Economic and Industry Research. Global Warning Climate Change Energy

The last word goes to the executive director of the Brotherhood of St Laurence, Tony Nicholson, who commissioned the analysis.

"This is a great opportunity, because if we seriously address climate change we can also do a lot to address entrenched disadvantage," Mr Nicholson said.

"For instance, we're advocating a national rental incentive scheme for landlords to make private rental properties more energy efficient, because we know many disadvantaged people have high energy bills because their homes aren't properly insulated.

"Australia has a national roads strategy; why don't we have a national public transport policy? More disadvantaged people tend to have older cars that consume a lot of fuel, and many live on the outskirts of cities and in country towns. So by improving public transport, you address both problems at once."

Global warming threatens civilization says top six scientists

See first source for the full article.

Present knowledge does not permit accurate specification of the dangerous level of human-made GHGs. However, it is much lower than has commonly been assumed. If we have not already passed the dangerous level, the energy infrastructure in place ensures that we will pass it within several decades.

We conclude that a feasible strategy for planetary rescue almost surely requires a means of extracting GHGs from the air. Development of CO2 capture at power plants, with below-ground CO2 sequestration, may be a critical element. Injection of the CO2 well beneath the ocean floor assures its stability (House et al. 2006). If the power plant fuel is derived from biomass, such as cellulosic fibres grown without excessive fertilization that produces N2O or other offsetting GHG emissions, it will provide continuing drawdown of atmospheric CO2.

clipped from www.journals.royalsoc.ac.uk Climate change and trace gases Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society A James Hansen1, *, Makiko Sato1, Pushker Kharecha1, Gary Russell1, David W. Lea2 & Mark Siddall3 Published online 18 May 2007 clipped from environment.independent.co.uk Six scientists from some of the leading scientific institutions in the United States have issued what amounts to an unambiguous warning to the world: civilisation itself is threatened by global warming. They also implicitly criticise the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for underestimating the scale of sea-level rises this century as a result of melting glaciers and polar ice sheets. The researchers were led by James Hansen, the director of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who was the first scientist to warn the US Congress about global warming.

¹NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University Earth Institute, 2880 Broadway, New York, NY 10025, USA jhansen@giss.nasa.gov
²Department of Earth Science, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA
³Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, Palisades, NY 10964, USA

*Author for correspondence jhansen@giss.nasa.gov

Indians most worried about global warming

Emerging economies like India and China are often accused of resisting the need to tackle climate change. But a new survey by Australian environmentalist, Jon Dee, published in the latest issue of New Scientist suggested that people of these two countries are most worried about climate change. More than we may be lead to believe if we just listened to those who would tell us to do nothing about emissions until the developing world is kind enough to pull its head in.

The survey was conducted by Seattle-based research group Global Market Insite. It polled opinions from 14000 people in 14 countries to gather solid data on how people feel about climate change.

clipped from www.headlinesindia.com Indians are far more concerned about global warming than any other nationality, despite the emerging economy being accused of resisting the need to tackle climate change, a global survey has said. Indians cared most about carbon emissions, with 55 per cent describing themselves as "very concerned" about the issue while just 32 per cent of Britons felt the same way, the survey conducted by Seattle-based research group Global Market Insite found. People in India and China are more willing than citizens of industrialized nations to place restrictions on carbon emissions, the survey published in the latest issue of New Scientist said. Australian environmentalist Jon Dee, who headed the survey team, says the findings fly in the face of calls for developing countries to wake up to the threat of climate change. Almost 90 per cent of those surveyed thought governments should do more to tackle the issue. Global Warning Climate Change Energy

Coal industry pledges "clean-coal" research dollars

Whenever I hear of "clean-coal", I think of safe-sex . Unless you and your partner are 100% 'healthy', and monogamous, there is no such thing as safe-sex, only safer-sex. Risks remain.

Anyhoo, there is more money for cleaner-coal research. This time coming from the industry itself:

clipped from au.news.yahoo.com Under political pressure over climate change, the coal industry has vowed to raise at least $1 billion to develop technology to curb greenhouse gases. The announcement increases by $700 million the funds producers have committed to clean coal technology. The Australian Coal Association said the $1 billion would be raised over 10 years by extending the $300 million COAL21 Fund. All black coal companies will contribute equally to the fund through a voluntary levy, which will continue indefinitely. "This should leave no doubt about the coal industry's intention to partner with state and federal governments on nationally significant clean coal projects," ACA executive director Mark O'Neill said. Queensland Premier Peter Beattie this week threatened to increase mining royalties, claiming the state's industry had reneged on a deal to invest in clean coal. Tags: global warming, climate change, clean coal, energy

Computers can't keep up with melting Arctic

Out of an exercise mapping real-world observations to computer climate models comes news that global warming is more accelerated than the scientific consensus holds.

Ted Scambos of the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado co-authored the latest study of Arctic ice melt, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, with other scientists from NSIDC and from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), also in Boulder, Colorado.

This is the third piece of recent evidence that the IPCC forecasts err on the conservative side.

clipped from news.bbc.co.uk

Arctic melt faster than forecast

By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News website Arctic summer ice has been shrinking by about 9% per decade Arctic ice is melting faster than computer models of climate calculate, according to a group of US researchers. Since 1979, the Arctic has been losing summer ice at about 9% per decade, but models on average produce a melting rate less than half that figure. The scientists suggest forecasts from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) may be too cautious. The latest observations indicate that Arctic summers could be ice-free by the middle of the century.

Solar breakthrough: households can power grid

Australia's future energy may be secured by a grid of good, old fashioned, trusty nuclear. Nuclear families, that is, and the roofs over their heads linked into a giant electranet, if the following breakthrough in photovoltaic cells holds true to its market promise.

clipped from www.theage.com.au Researchers at the University of New South Wales ARC Photovoltaics Centre of Excellence have developed a means of increasing the cell's light-trapping ability by up to 50 per cent. Such improvement to an electric solar system could power an average house with panels covering 10 square metres. "Overall, our new solar cells increase power generated by 30 per cent," said Dr Kylie Catchpole, co-author of the study. Prices for an installed solar system for an average house could fall 25 per cent from $20,000 to $15,000 once the technology filters through, the researchers say. There are only 30,000 Australian households - out of eight million - which have solar panels for electricity. If this solar system is used with a solar heating system for water and cooking, the excess power generated can be sent back to the power grid.

Global Warning Climate Change

Uni NSW research harnesses sea, sun for hydrogen fuel.

University of NSW researchers have been working on a revolutionary technology that uses sunlight to split sea water into hydrogen fuel, and water. It could be developed within a decade, and take another five years to be commercialised. But this is how long nuclear plants take to be built, and hydrogen fuel has two advantages - it's unlimited when sourced from seawater, and 100% clean, with water as the only by-product. It is yet-to-be-developed, but then so is the so-called 'clean-coal' saviour technology that the Howard government is pinning all our futures on.

Best of all it decentralises energy production. :::[SMH]

Leigh Sheppard, of the University of NSW, estimated that 1.6 million of the solar devices, installed on rooftops, would be able to produce enough hydrogen gas to supply Australia's entire energy needs.

He believes, "It is the cleanest, greenest energy option for a sustainable economy.".

Its technique relies on using a light sensitive material, titanium dioxide, to harness the power of the sun to split water into oxygen and hydrogen gas. "The process has the additional advantage that it works best in sea water," Dr Sheppard said.

Australia was rich in titanium, and had abundant sunshine. "And we are surrounded by ocean."

It might also be possible to use artesian water, or pump sea water inland, to a large array of solar panels which could produce hydrogen for local use and even for export.

An area covering 40 square kilometres would meet the country's energy needs.

The process is safe because it mimics nature.

The small UNSW team, led by Professor Janusz Nowotny, is a world leader in using titanium dioxide as a catalyst to split water. The researchers have developed instruments which can measure the electrical properties of the material so they can improve its performance by altering its oxygen content or adding impurities.

A visiting German solar expert, Helmut Tributsch, of the Free University in Berlin, said research was urgently needed into ways to covert the sun's power into usable energy, such ashydrogen fuel and photovoltaic electricity. Professor Tributsch said water splitting was a process nature used to harness the sun's energy. "We should really follow the example of nature. It is the only safe way to handle our environment in the long term."

Hydrogen was a clean and efficient fuel for powering everything from vehicles to furnaces and air conditioning. "When you burn it, it gives water, so there is no pollution of the environment," he said.

Professor Tributsch will give a public lecture on solar energy at the university on Monday night.

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Climate change explained at the Exploratorium

The interaction offered by the Exploratorium makes a complex subject easy to understand. The key to understanding, I believe, is understanding the interrelation of everything, and this site takes you through what we know about global warming through research thrown up by the many disciplines that come together to make the science.

Global Warning Climate Change Environment Science CO2 Carbon Sink Earth Australia Kyoto Energy