Monsoon 2017: Floods Across Gujarat, Rajasthan, East India Kill Hundreds; Thousands Homeless, Sky Weather, 28 July 2017 Floods across many parts of the country have wreaked havoc resulting in chaos in several areas. The flood toll has reached a whopping 200 now and a few thousands have become homeless.
Rescue and relief operations were in full swing which is why thousands were sent to safer places. Not only this, PM Modi announced that the injured are entitled to compensation of Rs 50,000, while the family of deceased will get Rs 2 lakh.
The two weather systems which developed over either side of the country, one being over South Rajasthan and Gujarat and another over Gangetic West Bengal as well as Jharkhand were responsible for bringing torrential rains. Heavy rains were witnessed over many parts of the country.
Parts of Odisha, Gangetic West Bengal and Jharkhand witnessed extremely heavy rains between July 21 and 25. These weather conditions were attributed to the low over Gangetic West Bengal and adjoining Jharkhand intensified into a low pressure area and now the system is lying over Southeast Uttar Pradesh as a depression…..
many parts of Gujarat and South Rajasthan have been reeling under flood conditions which escalated to being severe due to non stop rains.
Since the second week of July, back to back weather systems have been affecting Gujarat and South Rajasthan. Initially, the low which formed over Southeast Uttar Pradesh travelled over Gujarat and gave heavy rains over the region.
July 29, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
climate change, India |
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Floods hit northern Germany, force some evacuations, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/heavy-rain-leads-to-flooding-in-parts-of-germany/2017/07/26/1be4b41c-71e8-11e7-8c17-533c52b2f014_story.html, By Associated Press July 26
BERLIN — Heavy rains led to flooding Wednesday in some parts of northern Germany, forcing some evacuations and prompting residents to pile sandbags in front of their homes to protect themselves from a swollen river.
The center of the town of Goslar, in the mountainous Harz region of northern Germany, west of Berlin, was closed off and a hotel and a home for the elderly were evacuated as its central market square was flooded.
Elsewhere, streets were flooded and basements had to be pumped dry of water in the Harz region, and two stretches of railway lines were closed.
In nearby Hildesheim, people stacked sand bags along the banks of the swelling Innerste River. The fire department in Hildesheim was ready to evacuate more than 1,000 people from a neighborhood threatened by the flooding, the German news agency dpa reported.By Associated Press
July 29, 2017
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climate change, Germany |
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Climate change is wreaking havoc on our water, Grist, By Andrea Thompson on Jul 28, 2017 Cross-posted from Climate Central, For two days in early August 2014, the 400,000 residents in and around Toledo, Ohio, were told not to drink, wash dishes with, or bathe in the city’s water supply. A noxious, pea-green algae bloom had formed over the city’s intake pipe in Lake Erie and levels of a toxin that could cause diarrhea and vomiting had reached unsafe levels.
The bloom, like the others that form in the lake each summer, was fed by the excessive amounts of fertilizer nutrients washed into local waterways from surrounding farmland by spring and summer rains. Efforts are underway around the Great Lakes — as well as other places plagued by blooms, like the Gulf of Mexico and Chesapeake Bay — to reduce nutrient amounts to control the blooms, which can wreak havoc on the local ecology and economy.
But new research shows that climate change is going to make those efforts more and more difficult. As warming temperatures lead to increases in precipitation, more nitrogen, one of those nutrients feeding the blooms, will be washed into the nation’s waterways, the work, detailed in the July 28 issue of the journal Science, finds.
The biggest increases in such nitrogen loading will likely come in the Midwest and Northeast, areas already seeing the biggest uptick in heavy downpours……..
Costly blooms
Algae blooms are vast mats of microscopic organisms that, like plants, need sunlight, water, and nutrients to flourish. When an overabundance of nutrients like phosphorous and nitrogen from fertilizers are washed into lakes and coastal areas by rains, they can cause an explosive burst that forms a bloom.
Such blooms form each year in the Great Lakes, particularly in shallow Lake Erie, the Gulf of Mexico, and Chesapeake Bay, as well other areas. They can pose serious risks to public health from the toxins they release and can be poisonous to marine and lake life. When a bloom finally dies, it can also suck up all the oxygen in the water, creating what is called a hypoxic, or dead zone, that can also kill fish……..
More rain = more nitrogen
Using 21 climate models from the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, they looked at how changes in both overall and extreme precipitation would influence the amount of nitrogen entering waterways, keeping things like fertilizer use constant.
They found that by the end of the century, if greenhouse gas emissions continue on their current trajectory, increased rainfall will cause a 20 percent rise in the amount of nitrogen loading in waterways of the continental U.S.
The largest increases were in the Northeast (with a 28 percent increase in nitrogen), the upper Mississippi-Atchafalaya basin (24 percent), and the Great Lakes (21 percent). That result wasn’t surprising given that the Midwest and Northeast have already seen heavy downpours increase by 37 and 71 percent, respectively, since 1958, the largest increases in the nation, according to the 2014 National Climate Assessment……..
The study also looked to broaden the view beyond the U.S. by looking for watersheds around the world that were similar to some in the U.S. and seeing how nitrogen loading might change with precipitation. They identified India, China, and Southeast Asia — home to the majority of the world’s population — as areas that could see major rises in nitrogen loading in the future.
The study makes it clear that local managers and policymakers will need to rethink some of the ways they combat nutrient pollution and society will also have to develop technological solutions to reduce nutrient pollution, from implementing more efficient agricultural practices to potentially recycling various forms of nitrogen in sewage into animal feed, according to a commentary piece also published in Science.
If you want to manage nutrient loading “you need to account for the fact that the climate is changing at the same time,” Michalak said. http://grist.org/article/climate-change-is-wreaking-havoc-on-our-water/
July 29, 2017
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climate change, NORTH AMERICA |
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No drought relief in sight as Rome faces water rationing, Vatican shuts off fountains, By Kristina Pydynowski, AccuWeather senior meteorologist July 27, 2017, There are no signs of the drought ending in Italy in the foreseeable future.
July 29, 2017
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climate change, Italy |
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Drought Still Growing Across the U.S. https://www.hoosieragtoday.com/drought-still-growing-across-the-u-s/By Hoosier Ag Today -Jul 27, 2017 The latest Drought Monitor shows soils continuing to dry out and crops suffering as drought and abnormal drynessexpand and intensify across the Plains, Midwest, northern Rockies, and Virginia. Montana saw the most severe level of drought, called exceptional drought, grow by 10 points in a week. Twelve percent of the state is in exceptional drought and 24 percent is under extreme conditions. In neighboring North Dakota, 8 percent of the state is in exceptional drought. Another 30 percent of the state is in extreme drought. In the Corn Belt, drought conditions have shown up in Iowa. The state’s moderate drought grew to 34 percent. All states east of the Mississippi River are drought-free for now, but patches of abnormal dryness mean it could change as early as next week.
USDA meteorologist Brad Rippey says drought conditions are intensifying across the central United States. The Corn Belt has seen double-digit percentage increases. Drought coverage is growing around the nation, with the current drought monitor showing over 32 percent of the country in some form of drought.
July 29, 2017
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climate change, USA |
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How Climate Change Is Making Wildfire Season Worse, Here and Now, July 27, 2017 This summer there have been dozens of fires burning in the West, which has been experiencing record-high temperatures.
Here & Now‘s Jeremy Hobson talks with Gary Ferguson (@GaryAFerguson), author of the book “Land on Fire,” about why wildfires have been getting hotter and burning longer in recent years.
Interview Highlights
On how much worse wildfires are because of climate change
“The most comprehensive study to come out last year, kind of a collaborative effort between Columbia University and the University of Idaho, suggested that when you pull out all the natural climate change factors — things like ocean circulation patterns and whatnot — human-caused climate change is probably responsible for doubling the number of acres burned since 1985. So it’s a very, very fast change, and it looks like from all the evidence out there that this is just simply going to be worse before it gets better.”…….more http://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2017/07/27/land-on-fire-gary-ferguson
July 29, 2017
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climate change, USA |
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Sea levels, which were more or less constant for the past 2,000 years, have climbed at a rate of roughly 1.7mm a year in the past century; in the past 25 years, that rate has doubled to 3.4mm a year, already enough to create adverse effects in coastal areas. A conservative estimate holds that waters will rise roughly 0.9 metres (3ft) by the year 2100, which will place hundreds of millions of people in jeopardy.
even as we passed through this landscape, even as the lasers and radars took their deep gulps of data from the ice, I could hear expressions of anxiety from the data hunters. “At the same time that we’re getting better at gathering this data, we seem to be losing the ability to communicate its importance to the public,” one engineer told me four hours into a flight, during a transit between glaciers
Where global warming gets real: inside Nasa’s mission to the north pole For 10 years, Nasa has been flying over the ice caps to chart their retreat. This data is an invaluable record of climate change. But does anyone care? By Avi Steinberg, Guardian, 27 July 17
From the window of a Nasa aircraft flying over the Arctic, looking down on the ice sheet that covers most of Greenland, it’s easy to see why it is so hard to describe climate change. The scale of polar ice, so dramatic and so clear from a plane flying at 450 metres (1,500ft) – high enough to appreciate the scope of the ice and low enough to sense its mass – is nearly impossible to fathom when you aren’t sitting at that particular vantage point.
But it’s different when you are there, cruising over the ice for hours, with Nasa’s monitors all over the cabin streaming data output, documenting in real time – dramatising, in a sense – the depth of the ice beneath. You get it, because you can see it all there in front of you, in three dimensions…..
The crew of Nasa’s Operation IceBridge have seen this ice from every imaginable angle. IceBridge is an aerial survey of the polar regions that has been underway for nearly a decade – the most ambitious of its kind to date. It has yielded a growing dataset that helps researchers document, among other things, how much, and at what rate, ice is disappearing from the poles, contributing to global sea-level rises, and to a variety of other phenomena related to climate change.
Alternating seasonally between the north and south poles, Operation Icebridge mounts months-long campaigns in which it operates eight- to 12-hour daily flights, as often as weather permits…….
On each flight, I witnessed a remarkable tableau. Even as Arctic glaciers were losing mass right below the speeding plane, and even as raw data gleaned directly from those glaciers was pouring in on their monitors, the Nasa engineers sat next to their fact-recording instruments, sighing and wondering aloud if Americans had lost the eyes to see what they were seeing, to see the facts. What they told me revealed something about what it means to be a US federally funded climate researcher in 2017 – and what they didn’t, or couldn’t, tell me revealed even more……
Each of the 63 flight plans for this season in the Arctic was the result of months of meticulous planning. A team of polar scientists from across the US sets the research priorities, in collaboration with flight crews, who make sure the routes are feasible; the mission is managed from Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland……
Sea levels, which were more or less constant for the past 2,000 years, have climbed at a rate of roughly 1.7mm a year in the past century; in the past 25 years, that rate has doubled to 3.4mm a year, already enough to create adverse effects in coastal areas. A conservative estimate holds that waters will rise roughly 0.9 metres (3ft) by the year 2100, which will place hundreds of millions of people in jeopardy.
Given the scale of sea- and ice-related questions, the vantage point that is needed is from the air and from space, and is best served through large, continuous, state-supported investments: hence Nasa. There is a lot we don’t know and a lot that the ice itself, which is a frozen archive of past climate changes, can tell us. But we need the eyes to see it……
polar snow and ice, precisely because it is white, with a quality known as high albedo, deflects solar energy back into space and helps keep earth’s climate cool; the loss of all this white material means more heat is absorbed and the earth warms faster. In a variety of other ways, including moderating weather patterns, the ice helps makes life on earth more livable. The extreme conditions of the poles, so useful for instilling fear in 19th-century readers, actually make the world more habitable……
even as we passed through this landscape, even as the lasers and radars took their deep gulps of data from the ice, I could hear expressions of anxiety from the data hunters. “At the same time that we’re getting better at gathering this data, we seem to be losing the ability to communicate its importance to the public,” one engineer told me four hours into a flight, during a transit between glaciers…….https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/27/watching-ice-melt-inside-nasas-mission-to-the-north-pole
July 28, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
ARCTIC, climate change |
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Independent 25th July 2017, Scientists are “very worried” that the Greenland ice sheet might start to
melt “faster and faster”, a leading scientist has said. The problem is that
the warmer weather is allowing more dark algae to grow on the ice. Because
ice is white, it reflects much of the sun’s energy, but dark algae absorb
the heat, increasing the rate of melting. The Greenland ice sheet is up to
3km thick and would raise sea levels by seven metres if it all melted into
the sea. The current rate of melting is adding about 1mm a year to the
global average sea level. http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change-scientists-greenland-ice-sheet-melt-faster-worried-algae-a7858876.html
July 28, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
ARCTIC, climate change, oceans |
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Scientists dim sunlight, suck up carbon dioxide to cool planet, Environment Correspondent Alister Doyle , JULY 26, 2017OSLO (Reuters) – Scientists are sucking carbon dioxide from the air with giant fans and preparing to release chemicals from a balloon to dim the sun’s rays as part of a climate engineering push to cool the planet.
Backers say the risky, often expensive projects are urgently needed to find ways of meeting the goals of the Paris climate deal to curb global warming that researchers blame for causing more heatwaves, downpours and rising sea levels.
The United Nations says the targets are way off track and will not be met simply by reducing emissions for example from factories or cars – particularly after U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the 2015 pact.
They are pushing for other ways to keep temperatures down.
In the countryside near Zurich, Swiss company Climeworks began to suck greenhouse gases from thin air in May with giant fans and filters in a $23 million project that it calls the world’s first “commercial carbon dioxide capture plant”.
Worldwide, “direct air capture” research by a handful of companies such as Climeworks has gained tens of millions of dollars in recent years from sources including governments, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and the European Space Agency.
If buried underground, vast amounts of greenhouse gases extracted from the air would help reduce global temperatures, a radical step beyond cuts in emissions that are the main focus of the Paris Agreement.
Climeworks reckons it now costs about $600 to extract a tonne of carbon dioxide from the air and the plant’s full capacity due by the end of 2017 is only 900 tonnes a year. That’s equivalent to the annual emissions of only 45 Americans.
And Climeworks sells the gas, at a loss, to nearby greenhouses as a fertilizer to grow tomatoes and cucumbers and has a partnership with carmaker Audi, which hopes to use carbon in greener fuels.
Jan Wurzbacher, director and founder of Climeworks, says the company has planet-altering ambitions by cutting costs to about $100 a tonne and capturing one percent of global man-made carbon emissions a year by 2025.
“Since the Paris Agreement, the business substantially changed,” he said, with a shift in investor and shareholder interest away from industrial uses of carbon to curbing climate change.
But penalties for factories, power plants and cars to emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere are low or non-existent. It costs 5 euros ($5.82) a tonne in the European Union.
And isolating carbon dioxide is complex because the gas makes up just 0.04 percent of the air. Pure carbon dioxide delivered by trucks, for use in greenhouses or to make drinks fizzy, costs up to about $300 a tonne in Switzerland.
Other companies involved in direct air capture include Carbon Engineering in Canada, Global Thermostat in the United States and Skytree in the Netherlands, a spinoff of the European Space Agency originally set up to find ways to filter out carbon dioxide breathed out by astronauts in spacecrafts……..
Faced with hard choices, many experts say that extracting carbon from the atmosphere is among the less risky options. Leaders of major economies, except Trump, said at a summit in Germany this month that the Paris accord was “irreversible.”
“Barking Mad
Raymond Pierrehumbert, a professor of physics at Oxford University, said solar geo-engineering projects seemed “barking mad”.
By contrast, he said “carbon dioxide removal is challenging technologically, but deserves investment and trial.”
The most natural way to extract carbon from the air is to plant forests that absorb the gas as they grow, but that would divert vast tracts of land from farming. Another option is to build power plants that burn wood and bury the carbon dioxide released……http://www.reuters.com/article/us-oil-demand-shell-idUSKBN1AC1MG
July 28, 2017
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2 WORLD, climate change |
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Australia’s Greatest (Dying) Global Asset, By DAMIEN CAVENew York Times, JULY 26, 2017 “……..on a local level, it’s a magnet for tourism that generates around $6 billion ($4.8 billion USD) a year. This is what the Australian government seemed intent on protecting when it removed all references to the reef and the way it was being ruined by warming waters, among other things, from a United Nations report on climate change last year.
July 28, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
AUSTRALIA, climate change, environment, politics |
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Here’s how much Arctic sea ice has melted since the ‘80s, REneweconomy, By Andrea Thompson on 24 July 2017 Climate Central
Arctic sea ice has been melting at a steady clip this summer as it heads toward its annual low point. But a new chart shows that with nearly two months still left in the melt season, sea ice area is already below what would have been a yearly low in the 1980s.
The comparison shows the clear long-term decline of Arctic sea ice fueled by the global rise in heat-trapping greenhouse gases.
The dramatic shrinkage of sea ice over the past few decades is driving major changes, from the loss of crucial Arctic habitat to the potential influence of weather patterns around the world……http://reneweconomy.com.au/heres-much-arctic-sea-ice-melted-since-80s-55828/
July 26, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
ARCTIC, climate change |
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Could ‘cocktail geoengineering’ save the climate?, Eureka Alert, 24 July 17 CARNEGIE INSTITUTION FOR SCIENCE, Geoengineering is a catch-all term that refers to various theoretical ideas for altering Earth’s energy balance to combat climate change. New research from an international team of atmospheric scientists published by Geophysical Research Lettersinvestigates for the first time the possibility of using a “cocktail” of geoengineering tools to reduce changes in both temperature and precipitation caused by atmospheric greenhouse gases…….
So-called solar geoengineering aims to cool the planet by deflecting some of the Sun’s incoming rays. Ideas for accomplishing this include the dispersion of light-scattering particles in the upper atmosphere, which would mimic the cooling effect of major volcanic eruptions.
However, climate-modeling studies have shown that while this scattering of sunlight should reduce the warming caused by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, it would tend to reduce rainfall and other types of precipitation less than would be optimal.
Another approach involves thinning of high cirrus clouds, which are involved in regulating the amount of heat that escapes from the planet to outer space. This would also reduce warming, but would not correct the increase in precipitation caused by global warming.
One method reduces rain too much. Another method reduces rain too little.
This is where the theoretical cocktail shaker gets deployed………
their simulations showed that if both methods are deployed in concert, it would decrease warming to pre-industrial levels, as desired, and on a global level rainfall would also stay at pre-industrial levels. But the bad news is that while global average climate was largely restored, substantial differences remained locally, with some areas getting much wetter and other areas getting much drier.
“The same amount of rain fell around the globe in our models, but it fell in different places, which could create a big mismatch between what our economic infrastructure expects and what it will get,” Caldeira added. “More complicated geoengineering solutions would likely do a bit better, but the best solution is simply to stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.”
Caldeira said that the international collaboration of scientists (including scientists from China and India) undertook this research as part of a broader effort aimed at understanding the effectiveness and unintended consequences of proposed strategies for reducing climate change and its impacts. https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-07/cifs-cg072417.php
July 26, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
2 WORLD, climate change |
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Trump to tap longtime coal lobbyist for EPA’s No. 2 spot, WP By Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis July 21 17, President Trump will nominate a prominent coal lobbyist and former Senate aide, Andrew Wheeler, to serve as the Environmental Protection Agency’s deputy administrator, according to two senior administration officials.
Wheeler, a principal at Faegre Baker Daniels Consulting, is a lobbyist for coal giant Murray Energy and served as a top aide for Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.) when Inhofe chaired the Senate Environment Committee. He has represented Murray Energy — whose chief executive, Bob Murray, is a prominent supporter of the president — since 2009.
In addition to tapping Wheeler, according to the officials, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt is preparing to pick three conservatives to head three key divisions within the agency. Trump will nominate Bill Wehrum as associate administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation, Matt Leopold to serve as EPA general counsel and David Ross as assistant administrator for Office of Water……..
Tiernan Sittenfeld, the League of Conservation Voters’ senior vice president for government affairs, said in email, “With these nominations, President Trump is once again catering to his polluter allies and prioritizing their profits over our kids’ health.”……https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/07/21/trump-to-tap-longtime-coal-lobbyist-for-epas-number-two-spot/?utm_term=.ada170b0c8ef
July 24, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
climate change, politics, USA |
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But Lohmann and Gasparini warn that the plan comes with major drawbacks. It could, they say, lead to even more cirrus clouds being formed, exacerbating global warming in the process.
CLIMATE CHANGE AND GEOENGINEERING: ARTIFICIALLY COOLING PLANET EARTH BY THINNING CIRRUS CLOUDS, NewsWeek, BY HANNAH OSBORNE ON 7/21/17 “……Over recent decades, scientists from across the globe have been discussing the potential of geoengineering—the deliberate manipulation of the environment that could, in theory, cool the planet and help stabilize the climate.
There are main two types of geoengineering. The first involves removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it. This is already being done on an industrial scale, but it is not effective enough at the moment to cope with the huge levels of emissions. The other type, solar radiation management, is more radical—an attempt to reduce the amount of sunlight absorbed by the planet by reflecting it away.
Many ways of doing this have been proposed. One of the most widely discussed (and riskiest) involves the injection of reflective aerosols into the upper atmosphere. This plan is based on the cooling effect of volcanoes: Sulfur dioxide emitted in an eruption causes the formation of droplets of sulfuric acid. These reflect the sunlight away, creating a cooling effect. But this plan could also go very wrong. The sulfuric acid could strip away the ozone layer, leaving Earth completely exposed to the sun’s radiation.
In an article published in the journal Science, Ulrike Lohmann and Blaž Gasparini, from the ETH Zurich, in Switzerland, discuss a variation of this idea: the thinning of cirrus clouds to target the long-wave radiation coming from Earth.
Cirrus clouds are thin and wispy clouds that form at high altitudes and do not reflect much solar radiation back into space, creating a greenhouse effect. The higher the altitude at which they form, the larger the warming effect on the climate. And in a warmer climate, cirrus clouds form at higher altitudes.
So what if we got rid of them? These clouds could be thinned out—leading to a reduction in their warming effect—by seeding them with aerosol particles like sulfuric or nitric acid, which act as “ice nucleating particles” or INPs. If these are injected into the level of the atmosphere where cirrus clouds form, the way they form would be altered, resulting in thinner clouds that have less of a warming effect.
“The maximum cirrus seeding potential would be achieved by removing all cirrus clouds,” they write. “If cirrus thinning works, it should be preferred over methods that target changes in solar radiation, such as stratospheric aerosol injections, because cirrus thinning would counteract greenhouse gas warming more directly.”
But Lohmann and Gasparini warn that the plan comes with major drawbacks. It could, they say, lead to even more cirrus clouds being formed, exacerbating global warming in the process.
“Unintended cirrus formation is especially pronounced if the seeded INPs start to nucleate ice at very low relative humidities…. If cirrus seeding is not done carefully, the effect could be additional warming rather than the intended cooling. If done carefully, the negative radiative effect from cirrus seeding should be stronger in a warmer climate, in which the overall radiative effect of cirrus clouds will be larger.”
Because of the dangers, the scientists say any plan to thin cirrus clouds should be limited to specific times and places, where it would be most effective. “Contrary to solar radiation management methods, cirrus seeding is more effective at high than at low latitudes. A small-scale deployment of cirrus seeding could therefore be envisioned—for instance, in the Arctic to avoid further melting of Arctic sea ice,” they say, but the scientists add that there are many questions that need to be answered before cirrus thinning can be further explored.
“It is also important to remember that, like solar radiation management, cirrus thinning cannot prevent the CO2 increase in the atmosphere and the resulting ocean acidification,” they conclude. “For the time being, cirrus cloud thinning should be viewed as a thought experiment that is helping to understand cirrus cloud–formation mechanisms.” http://www.newsweek.com/climate-change-geoengineering-artificially-cool-planet-640124
July 22, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
2 WORLD, climate change, technology |
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This could be the next big strategy for suing over climate change.
Two California coastal counties and one beach-side city touched off a possible new legal front in the climate change battle this week, suing dozens of major oil, coal, and other fossil fuel companies for the damages they say they will incur due to rising seas.WP, By Chris Mooney and Brady Dennis July 20 2017, Two California coastal counties and one beach-side city touched off a possible new legal front in the climate change battle this week, suing dozens of major oil, coal, and other fossil fuel companies for the damages they say they will incur due to rising seas.
The three cases, which target firms such as Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP and Royal Dutch Shell, assert that the fossil fuel producers are collectively responsible for about 20 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions between 1965 and 2015. They claim that industry “knew or should have known” decades ago about the threat of climate change, and want companies to pay the costs of communities forced to adapt to rising seas.
“We’re already living the impact of sea level rise,” said Marin County Supervisor Kate Sears. She said a county vulnerability study found hundreds of county businesses and other assets could be at risk in coming years.
“This lawsuit is a natural next step in how we address the expense we’ve already had in planning for and trying to remediate the impacts of sea level rise, but also in addressing the impacts we expect in the future.”…….
The California cases are also proceeding under a legal doctrine called “public nuisance” (among other claims), which charges that under California common law, the companies have injured the counties and city by contributing to rising seas, and more frequent and severe flooding as a result.
But the difference is that this time, they are making state level nuisance claims rather than federal ones, which have already failed as courts pointed out that those worried about climate change had other recourses, such as EPA action.
The lawsuits were filed in California courts by Marin and San Mateo counties and the City of Imperial Beach, which sits south of San Diego near the Mexico border. Each cites specific damages expected from rising seas.
San Mateo cited worries about the flooding of the San Francisco Airport, along with up to $24 billion in assets being put at risk.
Marin County estimated nearly $16 billion of homes and businesses were threatened, and that with 6.7 feet of sea level rise, 7 percent of coastal roads would be “exposed to higher average sea level and storm threats at several locations.”
Imperial Beach cited the potential for “over $106 million” in property damages because of coastal erosion and argued the town has few resources to adapt to rising seas.
Vic Sher, a partner at the firm of Sher Edling who is helping lead the legal challenge, said the goal behind the lawsuits is to shift the “very real and very large costs of dealing with sea level rise” from ordinary citizens to the companies responsible for knowingly contributing to global warming.
He likened the cases to past litigation that sought to hold tobacco companies accountable for the public health toll of smoking, as well as efforts to force lead paint manufacturers to renovate homes where health risks remain……..
A strength of the lawsuit, note some legal observers, lies in the fact that sea level rise is easily measurable, constant (unlike climate-affected weather events), and very strongly linked to a warming planet. Moreover, analyses have become more and more precise when it comes to mapping which locations will be inundated, or subjected to greater flooding risks, for a given level of rising seas.
Bookbinder said there could be a time when the science is powerful enough to try to assess blame for other climate related changes, such as droughts, but that sea level rise is a stronger and simpler case right now. ……… https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/07/20/this-could-be-the-next-big-strategy-for-suing-over-climate-change/?utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_term=.af0543ecd151
July 22, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
climate change, Legal, USA |
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nuclear-news 