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Warming lakes speed up methane emissions

December 21, 2015

Warming lakes speed up methane emissions

Fisherman_on_Lake_Tanganyika

A fishing trip on Lake Tanganyika ends: The reduced productivity caused by warming may cut the amount of food available to fish. Image: Worldtraveller via Wikimedia Commons

The world’s lakes are heating up fast, threatening the fish on which millions depend and rapidly increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

LONDON, 21 December, 2015 – US scientists report that lakes worldwide are warming by an average of more than 1°C every 30 years, faster than the warming rate of either the ocean or the atmosphere.

The warming is expected to increase algal blooms and to mean global emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a century, will increase by 4% over the next decade. Over a 20-year period, methane is 84 times more powerful than CO2. 

The rapid warming of the lakes threatens freshwater supplies and ecosystems, the scientists report in their study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. They say their study is the largest of its kind and the first to combine satellite temperature data and long-term ground measurements. 

They monitored 235 lakes, representing more than half the world’s freshwater supply, for at least 25 years and found that they are warming by an average of 0.34°C each decade. Among the profound effects they say may follow is an increase in algal blooms. 

“These results suggest that large changes in our lakes are not only unavoidable, but are probably already happening”

The blooms, which can ultimately rob water of oxygen, are projected to increase by 20% in lakes over the next century as warming rates increase. Blooms which are toxic to fish and animals would increase by 5%. If these rates continue, the authors say, emissions of methane from the lakes will increase by 4% by 2025.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Perfect storm heads for fossil fuel assets

November 27, 2015

Perfect storm heads for fossil fuel assets

gas drilling cemetry

A natural gas refinery next to a cemetery in New Mexico, US. Image: Christina Xu via Flickr

Coal, oil and gas sectors warned that trillions of dollars of assets could be stranded if a global agreement on limiting climate change is reached at the UN summit in Paris.

LONDON, 25 November, 2015 – The fossil fuel industry may waste as much as US$2.2 trillion (£1.45 tn) in the next decade if it persists in pursuing projects that prove uneconomic in a world beginning to turn its back on carbon.

An independent thinktank, the Carbon Tracker Initiative (CTI), says the industry faces “a perfect storm” of factors, including international action to limit global average temperatures to 2˚C above their pre-industrial level, and rapid advances in clean technologies.

The CTI report says there will be no need for new coal mines, oil demand will peak around 2020, and growth in gas will disappoint industry expectations if world leaders agree and then implement the policies needed to meet the UN commitment to keep climate change below 2˚C − the threshold agreed by most governments.

Next week’s UN climate change conference in Paris will be trying to reach such a global agreement.

Excess of supply

The report warns: “If the industry misreads future demand by underestimating technology and policy advances, this can lead to an excess of supply and create stranded assets. This is where shareholders should be concerned.”

James Leaton, CTI’s head of research and co-author of the report, says: “Too few energy companies recognise that they will need to reduce supply of their carbon-intensive products to avoid pushing us beyond the internationally-recognised carbon budget.

“Clean technology and climate policy are already reducing fossil fuel demand. Misreading these trends will destroy shareholder value. Companies need to apply 2˚C stress tests to their business models now.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

More warming will bring a more polluted future

November 17, 2015

More warming will bring a more polluted future

Global warming wil increase airborne aerosols and cause more atmospheric pollution, scientists say.

LONDON, 15 November, 2015 – The future is slightly obscured. The outlook is less than clear. For once, such phrases are not metaphorical.

A world of global warming could mean a growing haze of solid and liquid aerosols – tiny specks of salt, fine dust, sulphates, black carbon and other particles in the atmosphere, according to new research.

Robert Allen, an earth scientist at the University of California, Riverside and colleagues report in Nature Climate Change that as the planet warms because of greater concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, driven by ever greater human burning of fossil fuels, so too the air could become more murky.

Aerosols happen naturally and because of human activity. They are exquisitely small blobs of liquid or solid afloat in the atmosphere, the product of dust storms, plant pollen, wildfires, kitchen fires, smoke from factory chimneys and vehicle exhausts, volatile discharges from forests and so on. They may make humans cough or choke, and they exact a long-term toll on human health, but they also affect the climate.

Increase inevitable

These aerosols both scatter sunlight and absorb it, and climate scientists who try to model the future must also calculate the impact of aerosols on global warming: will these reflect or screen out solar radiation to slow down the process, or accelerate it?

Dr Allen and his colleagues turned the question around: what will increasing average levels of planetary temperature do for aerosols? The latest and most up-to-date climate computer simulations delivered the answer. Warmer means more haze.

“Our work on the models shows that nearly all aerosol species will increase under greenhouse gas-induced climate change,” Dr Allen said. “This includes natural aerosols like dust and sea salt, and also anthropogenic aerosols like sulphate, black carbon and primary organic matter.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Soaring heat and humidity pose deadly threat

October 30, 2015

Soaring heat and humidity pose deadly threat

dubai workers

Working outdoors in places such as Dubai could become seriously life threatening.
Image: Carter S’ via Flickr

Parts of the Arabian Gulf region – prime source of the oil that helps fuel climate change – are most at risk of becoming uninhabitable for humans unless global warming is tackled.

A lethal combination of temperature and humidity may make some parts of the planet intolerable to human life before the end of the century − if we go on burning fossil fuels at the present rate.

New research indicates that the thermometer may climb to what meteorologists call a “wet bulb temperature” of 35°C − the temperature of human skin. At this point, people in the region would be unable to keep cool, and after prolonged exposure, even young, healthy, fit people could die.

There is no record that such temperatures have been reached anywhere in the world in human history. But the scientific report in Nature Climate Change suggests that under the “business as usual scenario” − whereby no steps are taken to address climate change, and the expanding the use of coal, oil and natural gas dumps ever greater quantities carbon dioxide in the atmosphere − then such conditions could occur once every decade or so before 2100.

Catastrophic change

In one of geography’s ironies, the region most at risk is the Gulf − the prime source of the crude oil that first began to fuel the world’s accelerating economies in ways that have returned massive quantities of fossil carbon to the atmosphere and precipitated the threat of catastrophic climate change.

The Arabian Gulf – also widely known as the Persian Gulf, and usually and diplomatically known just as “the Gulf” – is home to millions of people, and to billions of dollars’ worth of business and infrastructure investment.

It is simultaneously peopled by some of the world’s wealthiest citizens, and some of the world’s poorest workers already most at risk from heat exposure.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Stern warns: humanity is at climate crossroads

October 22, 2015

Stern warns: humanity is at climate crossroads

china emissions

China, the world’s worst polluter, says its emissions are now set to peak earlier.
Image: Gustavo M via Flickr

Expert on the economic impacts of climate change says the stakes have never been higher for radical action to be agreed at the Paris summit.

LONDON, 21 October, 2015 − The lead author of the 2006 Stern Review on the economics of climate change says that although there will be an agreement at the UN climate conference in Paris in December, it’s what happens afterwards that is crucial.

Professor Nicholas Stern warns: “Whatever way we look at it, the action we need to take is immense.”

If governments delay taking decisive measures to halt greenhouse gas emissions, he is convinced that a tipping point on climate will be reached. “In Paris, we need recognition of what we need to do − and how radical that change will be.”

Awareness of urgency

Stern, chair of the UK’s Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and a former chief economist at the World Bank, will be involved in the Paris negotiations.

He told a packed audience at Oxford University that, on the plus side, there is now a much greater willingness to work towards a meaningful agreement on climate change.

Generally, there is far more awareness of the urgency of the issue. China and the US are not – as in the past – “dancing around each other”, but co-operating on how to bring down emissions.

“I’m very optimistic about what we can do. That’s not the same as saying I’m optimistic about what we will do”

Stern said that during talks coinciding with the state visit to the UK by China’s President, Xi Jinping, Chinese officials said the country’s emissions would peak by 2025 and then start declining. Previously, China said it would not reach peak emissions till 2030.

“I’m very optimistic about what we can do,” Stern said. “That’s not the same as saying I’m optimistic about what we will do.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Climate changes can kick in below 2°C limit

October 19, 2015

Climate changes can kick in below 2°C limit

CROP - tibet

Extensive melting of the snow on the Tibetan plateau could be a tipping point.
Image: katorisi via Wikimedia Commons

Sudden shifts in settled climates can occur long before global warming reaches the internationally-agreed safety level, European scientists say.

LONDON, 18 October, 2015 – Climate change could arrive with startling speed. New research has identified at least 37 “tipping points” that would serve as evidence that climate change has happened – and happened abruptly in one particular region.

And 18 of them could happen even before the world warms by an average of 2°C,  the proposed “safe limit” for global warming.

Weather is what happens, climate is what people grow to expect from the weather. So climate change, driven by global warming as a consequence of rising carbon dioxide levels, in response to more than a century of fossil fuel combustion, could be – for many people – gradual, imperceptible and difficult to identify immediately.

But Sybren Drijfhout, of the University of Southampton in the UK and his collaborators in France, the Netherlands and Germany, are not so sure.

They report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they “screened” the massive ensemble of climate models that inform the most recent reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and found evidence of abrupt regional changes in the ocean, the sea ice, the snow cover, the permafrost and in the terrestrial biosphere that could happen as average global temperatures reached a certain level.

The models did not all simulate the same outcomes, but most of them did predict one or more abrupt regional shifts.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Forest loss and land degradation fuel climate crisis

September 26, 2015

Forest loss and land degradation fuel climate crisis

Forest loss and land degradation fuel climate crisis
UN studies show that the combined effects of degraded farmland and the felling and burning of trees are costing the planet trillions of dollars in ecosystem losses.

The planet’s forests have dwindled by 3% − equivalent almost to the land area of South Africa − in the last 25 years, according to a newassessment by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation.

While the planet continues to lose its forests – albeit at a slower rate – through felling, burning or being turned into farmland, another UN study predicts that the economic cost of degraded agricultural land in the form of lost ecosystem services now amounts to up to US$10 trillion a year.

Within 10 years, 50 million people could have been forced to abandon their homes and livelihoods to become migrants. If all those people were assembled in one place, they would constitute the planet’s 28th biggest nation in terms of population.

Increasing levels

Forest loss and farmland degradation are both part of climate change accountancy. The rise in greenhouse gases is in part linked to the loss of forest cover to soak up the carbon dioxide released by the burning of fossil fuels.

But increasing levels of heat and drought are likely to accompany climate change, increasing the area of desert or land too arid to support life and industry.

So in losing forest, and in watching farmland become saline because of over-irrigation, or exhausted by intensive cultivation or overgrazing, or simply increasingly too arid to support vegetation, humans are witnessing the loss of all sorts of valuable services not normally recorded by accountants.

Ideas such as “natural capital” and ecosystem services are attempts to place a practical value on things that nature normally delivers for free.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Arctic thaw would cost half of world’s annual earnings

September 24, 2015

Arctic thaw would cost half of world’s annual earnings

Arctic thaw would cost half of world’s annual earnings
If Arctic soils melt and release frozen carbon, the impact would cost almost half the world’s annual gross domestic product, researchers say.

LONDON, 22 September, 2015 – The melting permafrost in the Arctic could cost the world dearly. New research calculates that the economic damage that would flow from loss of permafrost and the increased emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) would add up to US$43 trillion. 

This is very nearly the estimated combined gross domestic product last year of the US, China, Japan, Germany, the UK, France, and Brazil.

And, British and US scientists say, this would be in addition to at least $300 tn of economic damage linked to other consequences of climate change.

 

The attempt to put a cumulative economic value on natural changes in climate that have yet to happen is part of the bid to get governments to take climate change seriously. In the latest attempt to cost the impact of rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, and the continuous rise in global average temperatures, all as a consequence of fossil fuel combustion and other human action, the economist Chris Hope of the University of Cambridge and the polar expert Kevin Schaefer of the University of Colorado have turned their sights on the Arctic.

The Arctic is the fastest-warming region of the planet. It was once much warmer, and its now-frozen soils are home to huge quantities of vegetation that never had a chance to decompose.

Increased risk

The two scientists report in Nature Climate Change that if emissions of greenhouse gases continue to rise as they are doing now, the thaw of the permafrost and the loss of the ice caps could release 1,700 billion metric tons of carbon now locked in as frozen organic matter.

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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