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William Happer, a climate sceptic, to be appointed to USA’ s White House climate change panel

White House climate change panel to include man who touted emissions, Guardian, Emily Holden in Washington, 21 Feb 2019

William Happer, a physicist who has suggested higher levels of carbon dioxide are beneficial, would be on committee,  The White House is planning to assess how climate change impacts national security and will involve a prominent doubter of the scientific consensus that manmade warming is putting the US at risk.

Donald Trump’s staff have drafted an executive order to establish a Presidential Committee on Climate Security, according to reports from the Washington Post and New York Times. It would include senior aide William Happer, a Princeton physicist who has suggested – in conflict with the vast majority of climate scientists – that higher levels of carbon dioxide are beneficial.

A recent assessment from the national intelligence director, Daniel Coats, called climate change a significant security risk, the Post noted……

Donald Trump’s staff have drafted an executive order to establish a Presidential Committee on Climate Security, according to reports from the Washington Post and New York Times. It would include senior aide William Happer, a Princeton physicist who has suggested – in conflict with the vast majority of climate scientists – that higher levels of carbon dioxide are beneficial.

A recent assessment from the national intelligence director, Daniel Coats, called climate change a significant security risk, the Post noted…….Donald Trump’s staff have drafted an executive order to establish a Presidential Committee on Climate Security, according to reports from the Washington Post and New York Times. It would include senior aide William Happer, a Princeton physicist who has suggested – in conflict with the vast majority of climate scientists – that higher levels of carbon dioxide are beneficial.

A recent assessment from the national intelligence director, Daniel Coats, called climate change a significant security risk, the Post noted.

…….In 2017, Happer told the Scientist that climate change research has become a “cult movement” https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/20/white-house-climate-change-national-security-panel

February 21, 2019 Posted by | climate change, USA | Leave a comment

Sudden rises in methane levels – scientists warn on need for urgent action on climate change

Sharp rise in methane levels threatens world climate targets, Experts warn that failure to act risks spike in global temperatures, Guardian, Robin McKie, Sun 17 Feb 2019 Dramatic rises in atmospheric methane are threatening to derail plans to hold global temperature rises to 2C, scientists have warned.

In a paper published this month by the American Geophysical Union, researchers say sharp rises in levels of methane – which is a powerful greenhouse gas – have strengthened over the past four years. Urgent action is now required to halt further increases in methane in the atmosphere, to avoid triggering enhanced global warming and temperature rises well beyond 2C.

“What we are now witnessing is extremely worrying,” said one of the paper’s lead authors, Professor Euan Nisbet of Royal Holloway, University of London. “It is particularly alarming because we are still not sure why atmospheric methane levels are rising across the planet.”

Methane is produced by cattle, and also comes from decaying vegetation, fires, coal mines and natural gas plants. It is many times more potent as a cause of atmospheric warming than carbon dioxide (CO2). However, it breaks down much more quickly than CO2 and is found at much lower levels in the atmosphere.

During much of the 20th century, levels of methane, mostly from fossil fuel sources, increased in the atmosphere but, by the beginning of the 21st century, it had stabilised, said Nisbet. “Then, to our surprise, levels starting rising in 2007. That increase began to accelerate after 2014 and fast growth has continued.”

Studies suggest these increases are more likely to be mainly biological in origin. However, the exact cause remains unclear. Some researchers believe the spread of intense farming in Africa may be involved, in particular in tropical regions where conditions are becoming warmer and wetter because of climate change. Rising numbers of cattle – as well as wetter and warmer swamps – are producing more and more methane, it is argued.

This idea is now being studied in detail by a consortium led by Nisbet, whose work is funded by the Natural Environment Research Council. This month the consortium completed a series of flights over Uganda and Zambia to collect samples of the air above these countries.

“We have only just started analysing our data but have already found evidence that a great plume of methane now rises above the wetland swamps of Lake Bangweul in Zambia,” added Nisbet.

However, other scientists warn that there could be a more sinister factor at work. Natural chemicals in the atmosphere – which help to break down methane – may be changing because of temperature rises, causing it to lose its ability to deal with the gas.

Our world could therefore be losing its power to cleanse pollutants because it is heating up, a climate feedback in which warming allows more greenhouse gases to linger in the atmosphere and so trigger even more warming……… https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/17/methane-levels-sharp-rise-threaten-paris-climate-agreement

February 19, 2019 Posted by | 2 WORLD, climate change | Leave a comment

Vast replenishing of world’s forests could cancel out humans’greenhouse emissions

Independent 16th Feb 2019 Replenishing the world’s forests on a grand scale would suck enough carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to cancel out a decade of human
emissions, according to an ambitious new study. Scientists have established
there is room for an additional 1.2 trillion trees to grow in parks, woods
and abandoned land across the planet. If such a goal were accomplished,
ecologist Dr Thomas Crowther said it would outstrip every other method for
tackling climate change – from building wind turbines to vegetarian
diets.
https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/forests-climate-change-co2-greenhouse-gases-trillion-trees-global-warming-a8782071.html

February 18, 2019 Posted by | 2 WORLD, climate change | Leave a comment

Nuclear Regulatory Commission removes a critical safety regulation

NRC Guts a Critical Safety Regulation, Recklessly Disregarding the Critical Lessons of the Fukushima Disaster https://www.ucsusa.org/press/2019/nrc-guts-critical-safety-regulation-recklessly-disregarding-critical-lessons-fukushima?fbclid=IwAR0-uToPAgtkdHj4rZ9dqJ5n7skVycU6y5UxjG_a_12lt7ZLhIwKCHfwZSM#.XGdxVOQzbGg– January 24, 2019  Decision Will Leave U.S. Nuclear Plants Dangerously Vulnerable to Major Floods and Earthquakes

WASHINGTON  —The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) Republican majority, in a 3-2 vote, approved a stripped-down version of a rule originally intended to protect U.S. nuclear plants against extreme natural events, such as the massive earthquake and tsunami that triggered meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan in March 2011.

The commission majority struck a provision from the draft final rule the NRC staff recommended in December 2016 requiring plant owners to protect their facilities from the real-world hazards they face today instead of “design-basis” hazards that were estimated using now-obsolete information and methodologies when the plants were built decades ago.

The commission majority’s act will leave unresolved how the NRC will address new information showing that plants may experience bigger floods and earthquakes than they are now required to withstand. It is possible that the commission will not require all plant owners whose facilities face greater hazards to make structural upgrades.

“Nearly eight years after the Fukushima accident, the NRC continues to disregard a critical lesson: Nuclear plants must be protected against the most severe natural disasters they could face today—not those estimated 40 years ago,” said Dr. Edwin Lyman, senior scientist and acting director of the Nuclear Safety Project at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

After Fukushima, an NRC task force recommended that the NRC “order licensees to reevaluate the seismic and flooding hazards at their sites … and if necessary, update their design basis and SSCs [structures, systems and components] important to safety to protect against the updated hazards.”

To date, the NRC has only implemented the first part of the recommendation: Owners have reevaluated seismic and flooding hazards. What they found is not reassuring. For instance, the flooding reevaluations revealed that roughly two-thirds of U.S nuclear plants face hazards beyond what they were originally designed to handle, including higher flood levels from  extreme precipitation, upstream dam failure and storm surge. The reevaluated flood height for local intense precipitation for the Palisades plant in Michigan, for example, was more than 25 feet higher than the level considered in the plant’s original design. Similar concerns were identified in many seismic risk evaluations.

Despite these findings, the NRC failed to implement the second part of the task force recommendation to require plant owners to strengthen their defenses against greater hazards. The rule that was approved today was originally intended to close that gap. The commission majority’s action today removed that requirement and will simply maintain the uncertain—and inadequate—status quo.

“The NRC must require plant owners to upgrade their facilities based on the best current information, the most realistic analyses, and the potentially devastating impacts of increased flooding from climate change,” said Dr. Lyman. “Failing to do so will leave some nuclear plants dangerously unprepared and needlessly invite disaster.”

February 16, 2019 Posted by | climate change, safety, USA | Leave a comment

Thousands of young people walk out of lessons in protest at political inaction over climate crisis

School pupils call for radical climate action in UK-wide strike, Guardian, Matthew Taylor, Sandra Laville , Amy Walker , Poppy Noor and Jon Henley16 Feb 2019

Thousands of young people walk out of lessons in protest at political inaction over crisis Thousands of schoolchildren and young people have walked out of classes to join a UK-wide climate strike amid growing anger at the failure of politicians to tackle the escalating ecological crisis.Organisers said more than 10,000 young people in at least 60 towns and cities from the Scottish Highlands to Cornwall joined the strike, defying threats of detention to voice their frustration at the older generation’s inaction on the environmental impact of climate change.Anna Taylor, 17, one of the most prominent voices to emerge from the new movement, said the turnout had been overwhelming. “It goes some way to proving that young people aren’t apathetic, we’re passionate, articulate and we’re ready to continue demonstrating the need for urgent and radical climate action.”

Organisers estimated around 3,000 schoolchildren and young people gathered in London, with 2,000 in Oxford, 1,000 each in Exeter and Leeds and several hundred in Brighton, Bristol, Sheffield and Glasgow.

In London, the protesters held banners and chanted as police and onlookers watched. They blocked the roads outside parliament chanting “Turn off your engines” at passing cars, and “We want the chance for change now” before mounted police moved them away. There were three arrests in London in connection with the protests. A 19-year-old man and a 16-year-old girl were arrested for obstructing the highway, and a 17-year-old boy for a public order offence.

In Manchester, hundreds gathered outside the Central Library before marching to the Royal Northern College of Music with signs reading “Climate over capitalism” and chanting “Whose future? Our future.”

Matt Sourby, 18, said his journey from Queen Elizabeth school in Kirkby Lonsdale, Cumbria, was worth it: “This is our future and this is making a difference. The government has to listen. I feel incredibly powerful just being here.”

The protests won the backing of a former UN climate chief, who said it was “time to heed the deeply moving voice of youth”.

Christiana Figueres, who led the historic 2015 Paris agreement, said the fact that children were so worried about their future they were prepared to strike should make adults sit up and take notice.

“It is a sign that we are failing in our responsibility to protect them from the worsening impacts of climate change,” she said.

The school strike movement started in August when Greta Thunberg, then 15, held a solo protest outside the Swedish parliament. Now, up to 70,000 schoolchildren each week hold protests in 270 towns and cities worldwide.

On Friday, tens of thousands marched again, some for the sixth week in succession, through towns and cities across Europe.

For the first time up to 1,000 pupils demonstrated in Paris chanting “Don’t go breaking my earth” and “One, two, three degrees – a crime against humanity”.

In Berlin, a large crowd gathered for the sixth week in a row. “We’re here now because we want to be able to be here in 50 years’ time,” read one banner……….

Thunberg hit back at the Conservative government, saying on Twitter that political leaders had wasted 30 years by not taking action against climate change. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/15/uk-climate-change-strike-school-pupils-children-environment-protest

February 16, 2019 Posted by | climate change, UK | Leave a comment

The wipeout of the Earth’s small creatures – by climate change

Climate change is killing off Earth’s little creatures http://theconversation.com/climate-change-is-killing-off-earths-little-creatures-109719, Bill Laurance, Distinguished Research Professor and Australian Laureate, James Cook University, February 12, 2019 Climate change gets blamed for a lot of things these days: inundating small islands, fueling catastrophic fires, amping-up hurricanes and smashing Arctic sea ice.
But a global review of insect research has found another casualty: 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered. It confirms what many have been suspecting: in Australia and around the world, arthropods – which include insects, spiders, centipedes and the like — appear to be in trouble.

The global review comes hard on the heels of research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA that suggests a potent link between intensifying heat waves and stunning declines in the abundance of arthropods.

If that study’s findings are broadly valid – something still far from certain – it has chilling implications for global biodiversity.

Arthropod Armageddon

In the mid-1970s, researchers on the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico conducted a large-scale study to measure the total biomass (living mass) of insects and other arthropods in the island’s intact rainforests, using sweep nets and sticky-traps.

Four decades later, another research team returned to the island and repeated the study using identical methods and the same locations. To their surprise, they found that arthropod biomass was just one-eighth to one-sixtieth of that in the 1970s – a shocking collapse overall.

And the carnage didn’t end there. The team found that a bevy of arthropod-eating lizards, birds and frogs had fallen sharply in abundance as well.

In the minds of many ecologists, a widespread collapse of arthropods could be downright apocalyptic. Arthropods pollinate some of our most important food crops and thousands of wild plant species, disperse seeds, recycle nutrients and form key links in food chains that sustain entire webs of life.

This ecological ubiquity arises because arthropods are so abundant and diverse, comprising at least two-thirds of all known species on Earth. In the 1940s, evolutionary biologist J. B. S. Haldane quipped that “God has an inordinate fondness for beetles.” Humans might think we rule the world, but the planet really belongs to arthropods.

Killer heat waves

The researchers who documented the arthropod collapse in Puerto Rico considered a variety of possible causes, including pesticides and habitat disruption. But the evidence kept pointing to another driver: rising temperatures.

Weather stations in Puerto Rico indicate that temperatures there have risen progressively in the past several decades – by 2℃ on average.

But the researchers are far less worried about a gradual increase in temperature than the intensification of heat waves—which have risen markedly in Puerto Rico. This is because nearly all living species have thresholds of temperature tolerance.

For example, research in Australia has shown that at 41℃, flying foxes become badly heat-stressed, struggling to find shade and flapping their wings desperately to stay cool.

But nudge the thermometer up just one more degree, to 42℃, and the bats suddenly die.

In November, heat waves that peaked above 42℃ in north Queensland killed off almost a third of the region’s Spectacled Flying Foxes. The ground beneath bat colonies was littered with tens of thousands of dead animals. Dedicated animal carers could only save a small fraction of the dying bats.

The El Niño connection

El Niño events – fluctuations in Pacific sea-surface temperatures that drive multi-year variations in weather across large swaths of the planet – are also part of this story. New research appears to be resolving longstanding uncertainties about El Niños and global warming.

Recent studies published in Nature and Geophysical Research Letterssuggest global warming will in fact intensify El Niños – causing affected areas to suffer even more intensively from droughts and heat waves.

And this ties back to Puerto Rico, because the researchers there believe a series of unusually intense El Niño heatwaves were the cause the arthropod Armageddon. If they’re right then global warming was the gun, but El Niño pulled the trigger.

Beyond heat waves

Puerto Rico is certainly not the only place on Earth that has suffered severe declines in arthropods. Robust studies in Europe, North America, Australia and other locales have revealed big arthropod declines as well.

And while climatic factors have contributed to some of these declines, it’s clear that many other environmental changes, such as habitat disruption, pesticides, introduced pathogens and light pollution, are also taking heavy tolls.

So, at a planetary scale, arthropods are suffering from a wide variety of environmental insults. There’s no single reason why their populations are collapsing.

Read more: Climate change: effect on sperm could hold key to species extinction

The bottom line is: we’re changing our world in many different ways at once. And the myriad little creatures that play so many critical roles in the fabric of life are struggling to survive the onslaught.

February 14, 2019 Posted by | 2 WORLD, climate change, environment | 1 Comment

Nuclear power useless against climate change, – costly, but above all too slow to arrive

Nuclear power not a competitive option, Matt Hall, “……….relative to other low-carbon energy sources available today, nuclear power is significantly more expensive, less flexible, and impractically slow to build.

Nuclear power is expensive compared to modern renewables. The Guardian, Matt HallThe most recent cost of energy assessments from Lazard, a very reputable source, show nuclear coming in at roughly three to four times the cost of utility-scale wind or solar power. Three to four times. If this comes as a surprise, it might be because nuclear projects end up on average more than 100 per cent over budget (according to a peer-reviewed survey of 180 nuclear plants). Though next-generation reactor designs promise significant improvements, that technology is still in the works. In contrast, wind and solar power are already mature technologies, widely deployed at utility scale, and more affordable than almost every other option.

It’s commonly argued that nuclear plants provide reliable baseload generation. This is accurate, but of decreasing relevance. The challenge with electricity supply is meeting the peak load, not the base. This calls for flexible generation that can ramp up or down when needed, energy storage (of which there is an expanding array of options), and demand response (e.g. Summerside’s smart grid). Furthermore, as our energy mix becomes increasingly renewable, the need for flexibility increases and the space for always-on baseload generation decreases. Current nuclear technology, which is inflexible and relies on full-time operation to be economical, becomes increasingly impractical.

The urgency for decarbonizing our energy system has never been greater. Last year’s special report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change pushes for a halving of global net greenhouse gas emission by 2030. This involves switching the majority of our energy use to electricity, and providing that electricity from low-carbon sources. The 2030 timeframe means we need to use technologies that can be deployed quickly. While wind and solar power plants can be installed in a single year, nuclear plants typically take 10 years. Even if nuclear power were cost-effective and compatible with the future of the electricity grid, nuclear plants simply take too long to build to be a significant part of the energy system’s evolution. …….

wind and solar, supported by storage and demand response, are the leading solutions for new electricity generation in the present. And, when it comes to acting on climate change, it’s the present we need to work with.

Matt Hall is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Sustainable Design Engineering at UPEI. https://www.theguardian.pe.ca/opinion/letter-to-the-editor/opinion-nuclear-power-not-a-competitive-option-283850/

February 14, 2019 Posted by | 2 WORLD, climate change | Leave a comment

   Global warming temperatures to rise by 1.5 Celsius in 5 years – India to get knocked out

   https://www.skymetweather.com/content/global-news/global-warming-temperatures-to-rise-by-1-5-celsius-in-5-years-india-to-get-knocked-out/  11 February 2019 – Global warming in the recent years has comparatively become a larger threat to the world. And the latest trends of extreme weather activities are a clear testimony to this fact. Though, there are certain sections of the society seriously thinking in this regard and trying their bit in bringing about awareness among people across the world, the vicious destruction of our planet continues.

According to meteorological reports, by 2023 global warming could temporarily hit 1.5˚C above pre-industrial levels. It will be the first time to ever happen and the results could be disastrous. There are also 10% chances of us experiencing a year where the average temperature will rise more than 1.5˚C.

So far, the hottest year on record was 2016, when Earth heated up to 1.11˚C above pre-industrial levels. Even though the heat has gone down in the past two years, it’s unfortunately only a small part of a long-term upward trend.

Due to certain natural factors, the heat we experience varies from year to year. However, scientists have estimated that we’re warming the planet about 0.2˚C in every 10 years.

Researches also state that, this rise in temperature would adversely affect regions prone to extreme weather conditions. This includes regions like South America, parts of Australia, Africa and India’s coastal areas.

Therefore, till the time we radically scale back our greenhouse gas emissions, the probability of each year creating some kind of a record cannot be ruled out.

– See more at: https://www.skymetweather.com/content/global-news/global-warming-temperatures-to-rise-by-1-5-celsius-in-5-years-india-to-get-knocked-out/#sthash.GK1czMcc.dpuf  

February 12, 2019 Posted by | 2 WORLD, climate change | Leave a comment

 Climate change increasingly ranks as the world’s most pressing security threat – Pew Poll

Climate Change, ISIS and Cyberattacks Are Seen as the World’s Top Threats in a New Pew Poll TIME, ByCASEY QUACKENBUSH , 11 Feb 19

 Climate change increasingly ranks as the world’s most pressing security threat, with terrorism and cyberattacks also topping the list, according to a new survey by the Washington-based Pew Research Center.

In a poll of 26 countries, 13 considered the warming planet the number one concern. This was followed by the threat of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which eight countries, including Russia, France, Indonesia and Nigeria, rated as the top threat. Four nations, including Japan and the U.S., cited cyberattacks as the most urgent issue………http://time.com/5526558/climate-change-top-threat-pew-poll/

February 12, 2019 Posted by | 2 WORLD, climate change | Leave a comment

What prevents us from thinking ‘meaningfully’ about climate change.

The climate crisis has arrived – so stop feeling guilty and start imagining your future  The Conversation, Matthew Adams, Principal Lecturer in Psychology, University of Brighton February 7, 2019 

Evidence of the devastating impacts of anthropogenic climate change are stacking up, and it is becoming horrifyingly real. There can be no doubt that the climate crisis has arrived. Yet another “shocking new study” led The Guardian and various other news media this week. One-third of Himalayan ice cap, they report, is doomed.

Meanwhile in Australia, record summer temperatures have wrought unprecedented devastation of biblical proportions – mass deaths of horses, bats and fish are reported across the country, while the island state of Tasmania burns. In some places this version of summer is a terrifying new normal.

The climate disaster future is increasingly becoming the present – and, as the evidence piles up, it is tempting to ask questions about its likely public reception. Numerous psychological perspectives suggest that if we have already invested energy in denying the reality of a situation we experience as profoundly troubling, the closer it gets, the more effort we put into denying it.

While originally considered as a psychological response, denial and other defence mechanisms we engage in to keep this reality at bay and maintain some sense of “normality” can also be thought of as interpersonal, social and cultural. Because our relationships, groups and wider cultures are where we find support in not thinking, talking and feeling about that crisis. There are countless strategies for maintaining this state of knowing and not-knowing – we are very inventive.
The key point is that it prevents us from responding meaningfully. We “succeed” in holding the problem of what to do about the climate crisis at a “safe” distance. As the crisis becomes harder to ignore – just consider the current batch of shocking reports – individually and culturally we will dig deeper to find ways to strategically direct our inattention…………

When it comes to the climate crisis, the personal is political. I am talking about a politics that grows from opposition and critique of our current systems. This is evident in young people organising school strikes and protesters willing to get arrested for their direct action. But we also need to pay more attention to what is lost, to who and what we care for, to other possible ways of being.

Some conservation scientists, at least, see recent cultural change as a hopeful sign of a growing sense of care and responsibility. So stop feeling guilty, it’s not your fault. Be attentive to what’s going on, so that you might notice what you care about and why. What are you capable of, and what might we be capable of together, when we aren’t caught between knowing and not knowing, denial and distress?

February 11, 2019 Posted by | climate change, psychology - mental health | Leave a comment

Fire extinguisher system at nuclear plant freezes

 https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20190210_10/  A fire extinguisher system has broken down at a nuclear power plant in northern Japan due to a record cold weather.

Hokkaido Electric Power Company says a worker discovered the problem at its Tomari nuclear plant in the country’s northernmost prefecture of Hokkaido early Saturday morning.

The problem affected equipment designed to maintain water pressure in the event of firefighting at the No.1 and No.2 reactors. All three of the plant’s reactors have been offline since 2012, following the Fukushima nuclear accident.

The utility says a part of the equipment was frozen due to the severe cold, causing the system to break down. It says there is no problem with the plant’s fire extinguisher system, and the problem did not affect firefighting functions.

Temperatures fell to minus 30 degrees Celsius or lower in many parts of the prefecture on Saturday. A nearby town recorded minus 12.7 degrees Celsius.
.
The company also says the temperature was nearly minus five degrees in the room which houses the equipment, but a worker forgot to turn on the heating system.

The utility says it will work quickly to restore the faulty equipment and take measures to prevent a recurrence.

February 11, 2019 Posted by | climate change, Japan | Leave a comment

Climate chaos ahead, as Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets melt?

Melting ice sheets may cause ‘climate chaos’: study, Daily Nation,  FEBRUARY 7 2019 Billions of tonnes of meltwater flowing into the world’s oceans from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets could boost extreme weather and destabilise regional climate within a matter of decades, researchers said Wednesday.

These melting giants, especially the one atop Greenland, are poised to further weaken the ocean currents that move cold water south along the Atlantic Ocean floor while pushing tropical waters northward closer to the surface, they reported in the journal Nature.

Known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), this liquid conveyor belt plays a crucial role in Earth’s climate system and helps ensures the relative warmth of the Northern Hemisphere.

“According to our models, this meltwater will cause significant disruptions to ocean currents and change levels of warming around the world,” said lead author Nicholas Golledge, an associate professor at the Antarctic Research Centre of New Zealand’s Victoria University of Wellington.

The Antarctic ice sheet’s loss of mass, meanwhile, traps warmer water below the surface, eroding glaciers from underneath in a vicious circle of accelerated melting that contributes to sea level rise.

Most studies on ice sheets have focused on how quickly they might shrink due to global warming, and how much global temperatures can rise before their disintegration — whether over centuries or millennia — becomes inevitable, a threshold known as a “tipping point.”

But far less research has been done on how the meltwater might affect the climate system itself.

“The large-scale changes we see in our simulations are conducive to a more chaotic climate with more extreme weather events and more intense and frequent heatwaves,” co-author Natalya Gomez, a researcher in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at McGill University in Canada, told AFP.

“By mid-century,” the researchers concluded, “meltwater from the Greenland ice sheet noticeably disrupts the AMOC,” which has already shown signs of slowing down.

This is a “much shorter timescale than expected,” commented Helene Seroussi, a researcher in the Sea Level and Ice Group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, who was not involved in the study.

RISING WATER LEVEL

The findings were based on highly detailed simulations combined with satellite observations of changes to the ice sheets since 2010.

One likely result of weakened current in the Atlantic will be warmer air temperatures in the high Arctic, eastern Canada and central America, and cooler temperatures over northwestern Europe and the North American eastern seaboard.

The Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, up to three kilometres thick, contain more than two-thirds of the planet’s fresh water, enough to raise global oceans 58 and seven metres, respectively, were they to melt completely.

Besides Greenland, the regions most vulnerable to global warming are West Antarctica and several huge glaciers in East Antarctica, which is far larger and more stable.

In a second study published Wednesday in Nature, some of the same scientists offered new projections of how much Antarctica will contribute to sea level rise by 2100 — a hotly debated topic………

A special report on oceans by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), due out in September, will offer a much anticipated estimate of sea level rise.

The IPCC’s last major assessment in 2013 did not take ice sheets — today seen as the major contributor, ahead of thermal expansion and glaciers — into account for lack of data. https://www.nation.co.ke/lifestyle/health/Melting-ice-sheets-may-cause-climate-chaos/1954202-4970670-jhymoo/index.html

February 9, 2019 Posted by | 2 WORLD, climate change | Leave a comment

British school children in their thousands will strike for climate action

UK pupils to join global strike over climate change crisis, Thousands of pupils to walk out of lessons amid growing concern over global warming, Guardian, Matthew Taylor, Sat 9 Feb 2019  

‘I feel very angry’: the 13-year-old on strike for climate action The school climate strikes that have led to tens of thousands of young people taking to the streets around the world over recent months are poised to arrive in the UK next Friday.

Thousands of pupils are expected to walk out of lessons at schools and colleges across the country amid growing concern about the escalating climate crisis.

The movement started in August when the 16-year-old schoolgirl Greta Thunberg held a solo protest outside Sweden’s parliament. Now, up to 70,000 schoolchildren each week are taking part in 270 towns and cities worldwide.

Individual protests have been held in the UK, but next week a coordinated day of action is expected to result in walkouts in more than 30 towns and cities – from Lancaster to Truro, and Ullapool to Leeds.

Jake Woodier, of the UK Youth Climate Coalition, which is helping to coordinate the strikes, said Greta’s message about the need for radical, urgent change had struck a chord with hundreds of thousand of young people in the UK. ……..

The UK walkouts are being billed as a chance to build towards a global day of school strikes on 15 March….. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/08/global-school-strikes-over-climate-change-head-to-the-uk

February 9, 2019 Posted by | climate change, UK | Leave a comment

Central American immigration driven by climate change, but this fact is being ignored

Climate change is the overlooked driver of Central American migration, https://www.pri.org/stories/2019-02-06/climate-change-overlooked-driver-central-american-migration, Living on Earth. February 06, 2019 Adam Wernick As people from Guatemala and Honduras continue to seek sanctuary in the US for a variety of reasons, including violence and poverty, another factor driving their migration has gotten much less attention: climate disruption.Many members of the migrant “caravans” that made headlines during the 2018 US midterm elections are fleeing a massive drought that has lasted for five years.

The drought has hit harder in some places than in others, says John Sutter, senior investigative reporter for CNN, who went to rural Honduras to report on climate change and immigration. In the area of Central America known as the “dry corridor,” for example, drought is not uncommon. But, Sutter says, some of the climate scientists he spoke with say they are seeing unprecedented effects.

“In particular, spring rains, which are incredibly important for corn crops — a staple in this region — just haven’t been coming,” Sutter reports. “They’re almost completely missing when you look at the average rainfall by the month. It’s partly that rains have decreased; it’s partly that they’ve shifted and are no longer falling in the seasons when they have been so useful to farmers in the past. But it’s been very troubling and created a lot of hardship.”

Many people who live in the dry corridor of Central America are subsistence farmers, completely reliant on what they grow for their survival. Unlike in the US and parts of Europe, there is no crop insurance or other programs to tide farmers over in bad years. Often, there are no irrigation systems, either. So, if the rains don’t fall, crops simply don’t grow.

“If you have one bad year and the rains don’t fall, that creates a certain stress,” Sutter says. “If you have year after year after year — and, at this point, essentially five years of very bad drought conditions — then that’s when conditions can lead to hunger and starvation.”

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization says 2 million people in the region are at risk for hunger, Sutter points out.

“I think that’s [something] people underestimate about the caravan, or any migration story, really, when you hear about it: It has to be really bad for you to want to flee a problem,” Sutter says. “There’s an incredible attachment to a sense of home and place, especially among people who are farmers, who are attached to the land. It’s a big deal to think about leaving. That gives you a hint at how intense the situation is for many farmers.”

While President Donald Trump claims that caravans of migrants heading from Central America to the US are an “invasion” of “gang members and very bad people,” his own commissioner of the US Customs and Border Protection says that crop failure is one of the main drivers of migration.

“Migration stories are always complex,” Sutter says. “It’s not untrue that violence is driving people out; it’s not untrue that poverty is driving people out. But it is also true that climate change and severe drought are causing people to move from Central America, and from other [regions]. And I think that we have to look at that in a clear-eyed way and think about what that means.”

He adds: “I wish the administration, or really anyone in Washington, would talk about this issue of migration in terms of climate change, because the projections for how many climate migrants or climate refugees there will be in the world are uncertain, and we’re not preparing for that.”

If anything, Sutter says, the United States and some European countries are doing the opposite. They are putting up walls and barriers and trying to slow the movement of people — fully knowing that climate change is going to push people out their homes.

The United States has done more than any other country to cause global warming, while many of the people suffering from the worst effects of this warming have done little, if anything, to cause it, Sutter points out.

“I think it’s a really important moral question we need to ask ourselves: We’re causing this hardship in parts of the world many of us may never travel through or see, but it’s real and it’s causing repercussions, one of which is that people are on the move to try to make ends meet, to try to make a livelihood,” Sutter says. “It doesn’t invalidate the other stories that we’ve heard about the caravan, but it certainly complicates them.”

Many climate experts believe the big, industrialized countries — the US, Europe, China — owe it to these people to tell this part of the story to the world.

This article is based on an interview that aired on PRI’s Living on Earth with Steve Curwood.

February 7, 2019 Posted by | climate change, politics international | 2 Comments

2 billion people at risk, as Himalaya’s glaciers melt

A third of Himalayan ice cap doomed, finds report, Guardian, Damian Carrington, Environment edito @dpcarrington ,  4 Feb 2019 


Even radical climate change action won’t save glaciers, endangering 2 billion people At least a third of the huge ice fields in Asia’s towering mountain chain are doomed to melt due to climate change, according to a landmark report, with serious consequences for almost 2 billion people.

Even if carbon emissions are dramatically and rapidly cut and succeed in limiting global warming to 1.5C, 36% of the glaciers along in the Hindu Kush and Himalaya range will have gone by 2100. If emissions are not cut, the loss soars to two-thirds, the report found.

The glaciers are a critical water store for the 250 million people who live in the Hindu Kush-Himalaya (HKH) region, and 1.65 billion people rely on the great rivers that flow from the peaks into India, Pakistan, China and other nations.

“This is the climate crisis you haven’t heard of,” said Philippus Wester of the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (Icimod), who led the report. “In the best of possible worlds, if we get really ambitious [in tackling climate change], even then we will lose one-third of the glaciers and be in trouble. That for us was the shocking finding.”

Wester said that, despite being far more populous, the HKH region had received less attention than other places, such as low-lying island states and the Arctic, that are also highly vulnerable to global warming.

Prof Jemma Wadham, at the University of Bristol, said: “This is a landmark piece of work focused on a region that is a hotspot for climate change impacts.”

The new report, requested by the eight nations the mountains span, is intended to change that. More than 200 scientists worked on the report over five years, with another 125 experts peer reviewing their work. Until recently the impact of climate change on the ice in the HKH region was uncertain, said Wester. “But we really do know enough now to take action, and action is urgently needed,” he added.

The HKH region runs from Afghanistan to Myanmar and is the planet’s “third pole”, harbouring more ice than anywhere outside Arctic and Antarctica. Limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels requires cutting emissions to zero by 2050. This is felt to be extremely optimistic by many but still sees a third of the ice lost, according to the report. If the global rise is 2C, half of the glaciers are projected to melt away by 2100.

Since the 1970s, about 15% of the ice in the HKH region has disappeared as temperatures have risen. But the HKH range is 3,500km long and the impact of warming is variable. Some glaciers in Afghanistan and Pakistan are stable and a few are even gaining ice, most probably due to increased cloud cover that shields the sun and changed winds that bring more snow. But even these will start melting with future warming, Wester said…….https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/04/a-third-of-himalayan-ice-cap-doomed-finds-shocking-report

February 4, 2019 Posted by | ASIA, climate change | Leave a comment

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