Scientist Emma Smart arrested on April 13th in London

From an Article by Jake Johnson, Common Dreams, April 15, 2022

Scientist Emma Smart went on a hunger strike Thursday after she was denied bail by London authorities while awaiting a court hearing on charges of “criminal damage,” which were filed after Smart and others glued scientific papers and themselves to a U.K. government building to protest destructive climate policies.

Smart, an ecologist, was arrested alongside fellow scientists earlier this week as they took part in a global nonviolent mobilization aimed at pressuring world leaders to stop expanding fossil fuel production in the face of intensifying climate chaos.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released new research Thursday ranking last month as Earth’s fifth-warmest March in 143 years and warning that Antarctic sea ice coverage has shrunk to a “near-record low.”

According to a series of tweets posted to Smart’s personal Twitter account, “she has been held in a permanently lit single cell with no window for over 40 hours” while her allies with Scientists for Extinction Rebellion were released on bail. Smart has been refusing both food and water since Thursday morning.

Smart’s court hearing is set for Saturday, Extinction Rebellion said in a press release. Showing solidarity with Smart and protesting her detention, scientists gathered Friday for a vigil on the steps of Charing Cross Police Station in London, where she’s being held, as youth climate strikers held their weekly demonstrations around the world.

Andy Smith, Smart’s husband, said in a statement Friday that “this was a minor crime with no disruption to the public.”

“Her treatment is disproportionate to her crime,” Smith continued. “What kind of world do we live in when scientists are forced to put themselves into positions of arrest and hunger strike to be heard? And why has she not been released?”

“Emma knows what’s at stake if we don’t stop fossil fuel investments and she is taking a stand for her nieces’ future and all those around the world suffering now from this crisis. Everyone must stand with her now and come out on the streets to show the government that change is coming whether they like it or not.”

Smart is one of dozens of scientists who have been arrested across the globe in recent days as climate experts—dismayed by governments’ continued refusal to heed their warnings—turn to direct action.

“The fact that Emma is being held beyond the usual 24 hours shows that the U.K. government is effectively at war with climate science,” said Pete Knapp, an air-quality scientist with Scientists for Extinction Rebellion. “They would rather lock up and silence experts sounding the alarm than do their duty and protect the public from catastrophic climate change.”

“The science is totally clear: we must not drill for new oil and gas,” said Knapp. “Instead we must move to clean energy as quickly as possible. But our government only last week declared it will license new fossil fuel exploration in spite of repeated and dire warnings from scientists that this will lead to disaster. This is the flagrant dereliction of duty that Emma is calling out, and they are locking her up for it.”

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Former ecologist Emma Smart talks to Emma Wrake AMRSB about her recent arrest at an Extinction Rebellion protest, and why more and more scientists are joining the activist group

From the Royal Society of Biology, London, April 15, 2022

Earlier this month, Emma Smart became the latest member of ‘XR Scientists’ (a group of scientists and former scientists within the Extinction Rebellion Activist movement) to be arrested. Footage shows her attempting to give a speech outside the Department of Health in London about the impact of animal agriculture on ecosystems and public health, before being surrounded by police. After refusing to move her protest to Parliament Square, she was then lead away and arrested, and police confiscated her speech, loudspeaker and microphone.

Smart, who spent nine years working to conserve freshwater species in the Middle East and discovered a new species of Arabian freshwater fish (Garra Smarti), says she became disillusioned with what she could achieve in conservation through research and NGOs, and has been an activist for the past year.

The XR Scientists group now has over 250 active members, some of whom were featured in a Biologist article on science and activism in June. Smart is currently challenging her arrest and says the police are using powers to thwart protests and ‘gag’ scientists from speaking at protests. “I once believed the people making decisions would listen to scientists – that is not true”

Coral reefs display much of the diversity of life

From “Living on Earth” for Week of April 2, 2021

NOTE: The Ocean Panel is a group of 14 countries looking to protect 100% of their ocean areas by 2025. Pictured: a coral reef in the Palmyra Atoll National Wildlife Refuge.

The oceans are facing serious and growing threats, including climate change, overfishing, plastic pollution and more. But a group of 14 world leaders called the Ocean Panel is committing to transform the ocean from victim to solution, by sustainably managing 100% of their ocean areas by 2025. Jane Lubchenco is the Deputy Director for Climate and Environment for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, as well as a co-chair of the Ocean Panel Expert Group that helped ground this vision in research. She joins Host Aynsley O’Neill for more about the Ocean Panel and its vision.

O’NEILL: Putting the oceans to work by catching some of the wind offshore is part of the Biden Administration’s plan to blunt climate disruption and reduce dangerous pollution. And the oceans are also getting a champion in the White House. Jane Lubchenco is the former Administrator of NOAA – the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She recently co-chaired a panel of experts advising 14 world leaders on how to transform the ocean from victim to a solution, with 100% sustainable management by 2025. She is now a senior member of the climate and ecology brain trust that President Biden has assembled at the White House, serving as Deputy Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Before she took her White House job she spoke with us about the vision and work of the Ocean Panel. Jane, welcome back to Living on Earth!

LUBCHENCO: Thanks, Aynsley, it’s a delight to be here.

O’NEILL: Now, when we look at how we currently manage the oceans, why does the world need this total transformation in management?

LUBCHENCO: The ocean is incredibly important to all of life on Earth. It’s important to livelihoods, it’s important to help mitigate climate change. And yet the ocean is under serious threat from a wide range of activities: climate change, pollution, overfishing, just to name a few. The current trajectory that we are on is really not good. And the question is, how can we address these underlying challenges? And part of the answer is that we need to do so more holistically than we have done in the past. We’ve treated a lot of these problems, issue by issue. And part of the message that the Ocean Panel leaders heard is the need for integrated solutions that consider the whole suite of human activities. The other major thing that I think they heard was that a smart future is not just doing more of the same. It’s actually doing things differently, being much smarter about how we fish, much smarter about how we produce energy, much smarter about how we transport goods around the world. And so much of what is in their new, exciting Ocean Action agenda is doing things smarter, more effectively, more efficiently, and also doing things more holistically.

O’NEILL: Now, Jane, what are some of the most important ways that a sustainable ocean economy connects with climate change?

LUBCHENCO: That’s a great question. In September of 2019, we had a new report that came out from the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. There was a special report on the ocean and the cryosphere, and it painted in very depressing detail, all of the ways that the ocean has been massively affected by climate change and ocean acidification. And it was clear from that report that the ocean is indeed a victim of climate change. It’s not just the changes in the weather patterns, and the extreme heat, and the droughts, and the megastorms that we’re seeing on land. But the impacts of climate change to the ocean have been very, very significant. But the same week, the Ocean Panel unveiled a report that it commissioned that asked the question, what is the potential for the ocean to provide solutions to help mitigate climate change. And before that report, when people thought about climate change in the ocean, they either thought about the impacts that I just referred to, or they thought about the ocean being important for adaptation. But very rarely has the international policy community focused on climate mitigation thought about the ocean. The report that the Ocean Panel commissioned, looked at a variety of ocean based activities and asked simply, what is the potential for mitigating climate change, and they found enough data at the global scale to analyze five categories of activities. And when they added up how much they could get from each of those five, they came to the astounding conclusion that it might be as much as 1/5 of what we need, by way of carbon emission reductions to achieve the 1.5 degree centigrade target of the Paris Agreement by 2050. So that’s huge. You know, a lot of those activities weren’t even on the table. And here, we find that they actually could play a very significant role in helping to turn things around in terms of climate change.

O’NEILL: So Jane, you mentioned five ocean based activities to help mitigate climate change. Could you go through those for us, please?

LUBCHENCO: So the first one was (1) increasing renewable energy from the ocean, and that’s a big one. Most of that is going to likely be wave energy, but it might also be tidal, it might be current, it might be thermal, depending on what part of the world you are in. The second category was (2) making shipping less polluting. So 90% of the goods that are traded globally travel by ocean and currently, that’s pretty polluting. It’s dirty fuels, they contribute significantly to greenhouse gases. But it is technologically possible to decarbonize shipping, and that could have a huge benefit. Number three is (3) focusing on what we call blue carbon ecosystems. So these are coastal and ocean ecosystems, such as mangroves, salt marshes, or seagrass beds, that are little carbon engines that are just sucking carbon out of the atmosphere like crazy. Those habitats; mangroves, sea grasses, salt, marsh beds, can not only remove but then sequester as much as 10 times as much carbon as an equivalent area of forest, for example. And we’ve currently lost about half of them globally. So here is an opportunity to actually protect the remaining ones, but also to restore those that have already been degraded. The fourth area for ocean based activities to mitigate climate change comes from (4) focusing on a little bit greater efficiency with aquaculture, mariculture operations, a little bit greater efficiency, with fisheries. But the big one in this category is really shifting diets globally, away from animal protein on the land, and including animal protein from the sea, instead of that animal protein from the land. And then the fifth category was (5) simply sequestering carbon on the seabed. And the panel who looked at these five categories, said that the first four, they felt completely comfortable recommending that they be pursued aggressively. Smartly, yes, but aggressively.

This fifth one, carbon storage in the seabed has a lot of questions still about technical and environmental impacts. And so they recommended further study for those. But that’s another deep dive, if you will, into the potential of the ocean, to not just be thought of as a victim of climate change, but as a solution to climate change by providing as much as 1/5 of the carbon emission reductions that are needed to get us to the 1.5 degree target by 2050.

O’NEILL: To what extent is it important to frame this vision as an opportunity, as opposed to a sacrifice for the countries involved?

LUBCHENCO: You’ve really hit the nail on the head, Aynsley. This is really the secret sauce here. There has been a lot of focus on the ocean as doom and gloom. And there are a lot of problems. There’s no sugarcoating that. There are a range of very serious challenges underway to the ocean right now. However, we also see looking around the world, some amazing solutions that have come to light, that have developed in this community, or that country, or this industry. And those solutions are bright lights. Collectively, they aren’t at the scale that’s needed. They aren’t at the pace that’s needed. But we have the benefit of a huge range of potential solutions that if they were adopted and implemented, could actually transform how we think about and how we use and how we benefit from the ocean in ways that are truly opportunities. So this is not really sacrifice. It’s being smarter about doing things. I think people are familiar with the concept of greater efficiency when we think about energy. You know, much of the focus for mitigating climate change has been focusing on how do we use energy more efficiently. And there have been tremendous advances in energy efficiency of our appliances, of our automobiles, of our transportation systems. That same concept of being more efficient, is what underlies a lot of the transformative actions that are in the ocean action agenda. So yes, this is an incredible opportunity. And it’s my belief that these 14 nations that have embarked on this journey of discovery and now journey of action will have such success with what they are proposing that others will say, oh my gosh, I want some of that too. I want to join forces because what they are doing is exactly what the world needs.

O’NEILL: Jane Lubchenco is a co-chair of the Ocean Panel expert group. Jane, thank you so much for taking the time with me today.

Links in Article: More on the Ocean Panel, National Geographic | “In Rare Show of Solidarity, 14 Key Nations Commit To Protect Oceans”, More on Jane Lubchenco

NOAA provides leadership on “climate change”

From an Article by Christopher Flavelle and Lisa Friedman, New York Times, October 28, 2020

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has recently removed the chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the nation’s premier scientific agency, and installed new political staff who have questioned accepted facts about climate change and imposed stricter controls on communications at the agency.

The moves threaten to stifle a major source of objective United States government information about climate change that underpins federal rules on greenhouse gas emissions and offer an indication of the direction the agency will take if President Trump wins re-election.

An early sign of the shift came last month, when Erik Noble, a former White House policy adviser who had just been appointed NOAA’s chief of staff, removed Craig McLean, the agency’s acting chief scientist.
Mr. McLean had sent some of the new political appointees a message that asked them to acknowledge the agency’s scientific integrity policy, which prohibits manipulating research or presenting ideologically driven findings.

The request prompted a sharp response from Dr. Noble. “Respectfully, by what authority are you sending this to me?” he wrote, according to a person who received a copy of the exchange after it was circulated within NOAA.

Mr. McLean answered that his role as acting chief scientist made him responsible for ensuring that the agency’s rules on scientific integrity were followed. The following morning, Dr. Noble responded. “You no longer serve as the acting chief scientist for NOAA,” he informed Mr. McLean, adding that a new chief scientist had already been appointed. “Thank you for your service.”

It was not the first time NOAA had drawn the administration’s attention. Last year, the agency’s weather forecasters came under pressure for contradicting Mr. Trump’s false statements about the path of Hurricane Dorian.

But in an administration where even uttering the words “climate change” is dangerous, NOAA has, so far, remained remarkably independent in its ability to conduct research about and publicly discuss changes to the Earth’s climate. It also still maintains numerous public websites that declare, in direct opposition to Mr. Trump, that climate change is occurring, is overwhelmingly caused by humans, and presents a serious threat to the United States.

Replacing Mr. McLean, who remains at the agency, was Ryan Maue, a former researcher for the libertarian Cato Institute who has criticized climate scientists for what he has called unnecessarily dire predictions.
Dr. Maue, a research meteorologist, and Dr. Noble werejoined at NOAA by David Legates, a professor at the University of Delaware’s geography department who has questioned human-caused global warming. Dr. Legates was appointed to the position of deputy assistant secretary, a role that did not previously exist.

Neil Jacobs, the NOAA administrator, was not involved in the hirings, according to two people familiar with the selection process

NOAA officials have tried to get information about what role the new political staff members would play and what their objectives might be, with little success. According to people close to the administration who have questioned climate science, though, their primary goal is to undercut the National Climate Assessment.

The assessment, a report from 13 federal agencies and outside scientists led by NOAA, which the government is required by law to produce every four years, is the premier American contribution to knowledge about climate risks and serves as the foundation for federal regulations to combat global warming. The latest report, in 2018, found that climate change poses an imminent and dire threat to the United States and its economy.

“The real issue at play is the National Climate Assessment,” said Judith Curry, a former chairwoman of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology who said she has been in contact with Dr. Maue, the new chief scientist. “That’s what the powers that be are trying to influence.”

In addition to Dr. Curry, the strategy was described by Myron Ebell, a director at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and a former member of Mr. Trump’s transition team, and John Christy, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Dr. Christy, a critic of past National Climate Assessments, said he was asked by the White House this summer to take on a senior role at NOAA, according to E&E News, but declined the offer. He said he understood the role to include changing the agency’s approach to the climate assessment.

Ms. Curry and the others said that, if Mr. Trump wins re-election, further changes at NOAA would include removing longtime authors of the climate assessment and adding new ones who challenge the degree to which warming is occurring, the extent to which it is caused by human activities and the danger it poses to human health, national security and the economy.

A biased or diminished climate assessment would have wide-ranging implications. It could be used in court to bolster the positions of fossil fuel companies being sued for climate damages. It could counter congressional efforts to reduce carbon emissions. And, it ultimately could weaken what is known as the “endangerment finding,” a 2009 scientific finding by the Environmental Protection Agency that said greenhouse gases endanger public health and thus obliged the federal government to regulate carbon dioxide emissions under the Clean Air Act.

Other changes could include shifting NOAA funding to researchers who reject the established scientific consensus on climate change and eliminating the use of certain scientific models that project dire consequences for the planet if countries do little to reduce carbon dioxide pollution.

Dr. Noble, the new chief of staff, has already pushed to install a new layer of scrutiny on grants that NOAA awards for climate research, according to people familiar with those discussions.

Meaningfully changing the National Climate Assessment’s findings would be hard to accomplish, according to Brenda Ekwurzel, director of climate science for the Union of Concerned Scientists and co-author of a chapter in the latest edition of the report.

Still, Dr. Ekwurzel said NOAA’s role leading the report is vital and added that any attempt to undermine climate research for political purposes would threaten public safety and economic growth. “You need to have a well-functioning scientific enterprise,” she said. “The more we back away from that, the more we erode our democracy.”

Most of the changes at NOAA could be reversed by the next president, officials say, making next week’s election a referendum on the future of the agency.

The dissonance between NOAA’s work and Mr. Trump’s dismissiveness toward climate change became clear at the end of 2018, with the publication of the latest installment of the National Climate Assessment. The report put Mr. Trump in the awkward position of disavowing the findings of his own government. “I don’t believe it,” the president said of the economic assessment in the report.

But for the president’s advisers, the climate assessment posed a greater problem than being mildly embarrassing. It threatened the administration’s policy aims, because its conclusions about the threat of climate change made it harder, from a legal perspective, for the administration to justify rolling back limits of greenhouse gas emissions.

Mr. Ebell and another former member of Mr. Trump’s transition team, Steven J. Milloy, said they expected that Dr. Legates in particular would steer the next National Climate Assessment in a sharply different direction. They said Dr. Legates intended to question the models that NOAA scientists use to predict the future rate of warming and its effects on precipitation. Climate denialists broadly say the models used by scientists are flawed.

That could ultimately make the endangerment finding, the scientific and legal foundation for regulating greenhouse gas emissions, vulnerable. As recently as July, Mr. Legates explained the connection himself: In an op-ed for Townhall, a conservative website, he noted that the science that underpins the endangerment finding relies primarily on the National Climate Assessment and claimed the models employed by its authors “systematically overestimate” warming.

Officials at NOAA also say they fear that the new staffers will bring more climate denialists into the agency and push out scientists who object. They cite an executive order Mr. Trump signed last week making it easier to hire and fire civil servants involved in setting policy.

The spate of new appointees isn’t the only example of growing political constraints. In August, a few weeks before the new political staff began arriving at NOAA, the Commerce Department, which oversees NOAA and a handful of other agencies, issued a surprise memorandum: All internal and external communications must be approved by political staff at the department at least three days before being issued. The restrictions applied to social media posts, news releases and even agencywide emails.

The new policy meant that Dr. Jacobs, the NOAA administrator, could no longer send messages to his own staff members without having them cleared from above. The goal of the policy was to make sure all communications “serve the needs of your employees and mission while aligning with the over-arching guidance from the White House and Department,” the memo said.

“I think that until recently NOAA has been mostly spared the political interference with science that we’ve seen as a hallmark across this administration,” said Jane Lubchenco, who served as NOAA administrator in the Obama administration.

“That integrity and the credibility that it brings are threatened by these recent appointments,” Dr. Lubchenco said. “The positions that these individuals are in gives them the perfect opportunity to suppress, distort and cherry-pick information to make it whatever the party line is.”

Temperature changes from 1880 are profound — now a crisis

From the NASA/NOAA Website “Global Climate Change — Vital Signs of the Planet” as downloaded on February 18, 2020

Multiple studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals show that 97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree*: Climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities.

In addition, most of the leading scientific organizations worldwide have issued public statements endorsing this position. The following is a partial list of these organizations, along with links to their published statements and a selection of related resources.

AMERICAN SCIENTIFIC SOCIETIES

Statement on Climate Change from 18 Scientific Associations — “Observations throughout the world make it clear that climate change is occurring, and rigorous scientific research demonstrates that the greenhouse gases emitted by human activities are the primary driver.” (2009)

American Association for the Advancement of Science — “Based on well-established evidence, about 97% of climate scientists have concluded that human-caused climate change is happening.” (2014)

American Chemical Society — “The Earth’s climate is changing in response to increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and particulate matter in the atmosphere, largely as the result of human activities.” (2016-2019)

American Geophysical Union — “Based on extensive scientific evidence, it is extremely likely that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases, are the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century. There is no alterative explanation supported by convincing evidence.” (2019)

American Medical Association — “Our AMA … supports the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fourth assessment report and concurs with the scientific consensus that the Earth is undergoing adverse global climate change and that anthropogenic contributions are significant.” (2019)

American Meteorological Society — “Research has found a human influence on the climate of the past several decades … The IPCC (2013), USGCRP (2017), and USGCRP (2018) indicate that it is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-twentieth century.” (2019)

American Physical Society — “Earth’s changing climate is a critical issue and poses the risk of significant environmental, social and economic disruptions around the globe. While natural sources of climate variability are significant, multiple lines of evidence indicate that human influences have had an increasingly dominant effect on global climate warming observed since the mid-twentieth century.” (2015)

The Geological Society of America — “The Geological Society of America (GSA) concurs with assessments by the National Academies of Science (2005), the National Research Council (2011), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2013) and the U.S. Global Change Research Program (Melillo et al., 2014) that global climate has warmed in response to increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases … Human activities (mainly greenhouse-gas emissions) are the dominant cause of the rapid warming since the middle 1900s (IPCC, 2013).” (2015)

SCIENCE ACADEMIES

International Academies: Joint Statement — “Climate change is real. There will always be uncertainty in understanding a system as complex as the world’s climate. However there is now strong evidence that significant global warming is occurring. The evidence comes from direct measurements of rising surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures and from phenomena such as increases in average global sea levels, retreating glaciers, and changes to many physical and biological systems. It is likely that most of the warming in recent decades can be attributed to human activities (IPCC 2001).” (2005, 11 international science academies)

U.S. National Academy of Sciences — “Scientists have known for some time, from multiple lines of evidence, that humans are changing Earth’s climate, primarily through greenhouse gas emissions.”

U.S. GOVERNMENT AGENCIES

U.S. Global Change Research Program

“Earth’s climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization, primarily as a result of human activities.” (2018, 13 U.S. government departments and agencies)

INTERGOVERNMENTAL BODIES

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, and sea level has risen.”

“Human influence on the climate system is clear, and recent anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are the highest in history. Recent climate changes have had widespread impacts on human and natural systems.”

OTHER RESOURCES OF INFORMATION

List of Worldwide Scientific Organizations

The following page lists the nearly 200 worldwide scientific organizations that hold the position that climate change has been caused by human action:

http://www.opr.ca.gov/facts/list-of-scientific-organizations.html

U.S. Agencies

The following page contains information on what federal agencies are doing to adapt to climate change:

https://www.c2es.org/site/assets/uploads/2012/02/climate-change-adaptation-what-federal-agencies-are-doing.pdf

*Technically, a “consensus” is a general agreement of opinion, but the scientific method steers us away from this to an objective framework. In science, facts or observations are explained by a hypothesis (a statement of a possible explanation for some natural phenomenon), which can then be tested and retested until it is refuted (or disproved).

As scientists gather more observations, they will build off one explanation and add details to complete the picture. Eventually, a group of hypotheses might be integrated and generalized into a scientific theory, a scientifically acceptable general principle or body of principles offered to explain phenomena.

References​ for this Article

J. Cook, et al, “Consensus on consensus: a synthesis of consensus estimates on human-caused global warming,” Environmental Research Letters Vol. 11 No. 4, (13 April 2016); DOI:10.1088/1748-9326/11/4/048002

Quotation from page 6: “The number of papers rejecting AGW [Anthropogenic, or human-caused, Global Warming] is a miniscule proportion of the published research, with the percentage slightly decreasing over time. Among papers expressing a position on AGW, an overwhelming percentage (97.2% based on self-ratings, 97.1% based on abstract ratings) endorses the scientific consensus on AGW.”

J. Cook, et al, “Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature,” Environmental Research Letters Vol. 8 No. 2, (15 May 2013); DOI:10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/024024

Quotation from page 3: “Among abstracts that expressed a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the scientific consensus. Among scientists who expressed a position on AGW in their abstract, 98.4% endorsed the consensus.”

W. R. L. Anderegg, “Expert Credibility in Climate Change,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Vol. 107 No. 27, 12107-12109 (21 June 2010); DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1003187107.

P. T. Doran & M. K. Zimmerman, “Examining the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change,” Eos Transactions American Geophysical Union Vol. 90 Issue 3 (2009), 22; DOI: 10.1029/2009EO030002.

N. Oreskes, “Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change,” Science Vol. 306 no. 5702, p. 1686 (3 December 2004); DOI: 10.1126/science.1103618

NOAA’s contributions involve both the weather AND the climate

From an Article by Rob Hotakainen, E&E News, December 18, 2019

PHOTO from ARTICLE: Neil Jacobs (left) talks with a staffer at a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather forecasting and research facility in Norman, Oklahoma, in August 2018.

President Donald Trump today nominated Neil Jacobs, the acting chief of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), to become the agency’s 11th administrator.

Jacobs’s nomination came a month after Trump’s first pick, Barry Myers, withdrew due to health concerns. The former CEO of AccuWeather Inc., Myers generated a storm of criticism from Democrats, who said his lack of a science degree disqualified him and that his ties to his family’s weather forecasting company constituted a conflict of interest.

Jacobs, a former chief scientist at Panasonic Avionics Corporation in Lake Forest, California, took over as NOAA’s acting administrator in February, replacing Timothy Gallaudet, who’s now the deputy administrator. He has a doctorate in numerical weather prediction from North Carolina State University in Raleigh, and lives in Durham, North Carolina, with his wife and two sons.

In a confirmation hearing, Jacobs would face certain questioning from senators on his role in this year’s Hurricane Dorian weather forecasting scandal. Jacobs conducted a weeklong damage control tour in September, meeting with weather forecast offices after the agency’s Washington office sided with Trump when he erroneously claimed Dorian would likely hit Alabama (Greenwire, Sept. 16).

Jacobs sent an email to employees in September, saying NOAA was “committed to upholding scientific integrity.” But the incident prompted three ongoing federal investigations: by NOAA’s acting chief scientist; the Commerce Department Office of Inspector General; and the House of Representatives Science, Space and Technology Committee.

Jacobs has already been through the confirmation process, having been approved by the Senate in 2017 as assistant Commerce secretary for environmental observation and prediction.

At his confirmation hearing before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, Jacobs told lawmakers he was naturally drawn to weather forecasting, having grown up in Florida and South Carolina and always living close to the ocean, enjoying surfing, diving and fishing.

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See also: “The world from our childhood is no longer here”: Report details drastic changes as Arctic warms, Jeff Berardelli, CBS News, December 10, 2019

National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA)

From an Article of WhoWhatWhy.org, WWW Internet, November 23, 2019

If you are shivering in a freezing, snow-blanketed part of the world, global warming might seem like a fine thing to have. But, believe it or not, you can thank global warming for this cold weather.

The summer of 2019 was the hottest on record in the northern hemisphere, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). And there were other extremes this summer — severe drought in India, rains and record floods in the American Midwest, devastating fires in the American West and in Australia. And now the cold.

It seems as if we’re trading weather with the Arctic. We send up our hot air — and the Arctic sends down its cold air.

But here’s a more scientific explanation: It’s all about the jet stream, a ribbon of fast-moving air that flows west to east over the Northern Hemisphere. NOAA defines it this way: “Jet streams are the major means of transport for weather systems. A jet stream is an area of strong winds ranging from 120–250 mph that can be thousands of miles long, a couple of hundred miles across and a few miles deep… This means most jet streams are about 6–9 miles off the ground.”

But how does it work? And why does it make the summers warmer and the winters colder? Please see the story below for answers.

Recent headlines on climate events should make things difficult for the average global warming/climate change denier:

Last year was the fourth hottest year on record, globally. And, just two days ago, on June 13, Greenland lost two billion tons of ice.

The Arctic is heating up twice as fast as the rest of the world. Because of the warm air above, the Arctic sea ice melts, turning its surface from one that reflects to one that absorbs solar energy, warming up the water even more. Without the ice cover, water evaporates, contributing to greenhouse gases. A vicious circle.

And the levels of carbon dioxide — the greenhouse gas considered most responsible for global warming — have reached 415 PPM (parts per million), the highest they have ever been in human history.

But will all of this disastrous news make global warming and climate change more difficult to deny? Probably not, because when winter comes, it may be colder than ever, and last longer.

And try to explain this to the denier: the winters are colder — because the planet is heating up.

Here is a video that will show you just how that happens, as well as a lot of other amazing things about our planet:

https://youtu.be/yQliow4ghtU

Photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from NASA.

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PRESS RELEASE: “Effects of climate change”
Met Office, UK Government, December 5, 2019

Climate change is already having visible effects on the world. The Earth is warming, rainfall patterns are changing, and sea levels are rising. These changes can increase the risk of heatwaves, floods, droughts, and fires.

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/learn-about/climate-and-climate-change/climate-change/effects-of-climate-change

Sea ice along Greenland’s coast this year!

From an Article by John Schwartz and Henry Fountain, New York Times, December 11, 2018

Persistent warming in the Arctic is pushing the region into “uncharted territory” and increasingly affecting the continental United States, scientists said Tuesday.

“We’re seeing this continued increase of warmth pervading across the entire Arctic system,” said Emily Osborne, an official with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who presented the agency’s annual assessment of the state of the region, the “Arctic Report Card.”

The Arctic has been warmer over the last five years than at any time since records began in 1900, the report found, and the region is warming at twice the rate as the rest of the planet.

Dr. Osborne, the lead editor of the report and manager of NOAA’s Arctic Research Program, said the Arctic was undergoing its “most unprecedented transition in human history.”

In 2018, “warming air and ocean temperatures continued to drive broad long-term change across the polar region, pushing the Arctic into uncharted territory,” she said at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Washington.

The rising air temperatures are having profound effects on sea ice, and on life on land and in the ocean, scientists said. The impacts can be felt far beyond the region, especially since the changing Arctic climate may be influencing extreme weather events around the world.

The new edition of the report does not present a radical break with past installments, but it shows that troublesome trends wrought by climate change are intensifying. Air temperatures in the Arctic in 2018 will be the second-warmest ever recorded, the report said, behind only 2016.

Susan M. Natali, an Arctic scientist at Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts who was not involved in the research, said the report was another warning going unheeded. “Every time you see a report, things get worse, and we’re still not taking any action,” she said. “It adds support that these changes are happening, that they are observable.”

The warmer Arctic air causes the jet stream to become “sluggish and unusually wavy,” the researchers said. That has possible connections to extreme weather events elsewhere on the globe, including last winter’s severe storms in the United States and a bitter cold spell in Europe known as the “Beast From the East.”

The jet stream normally acts as a kind of atmospheric spinning lasso that encircles and contains the cold air near the pole; a weaker, wavering jet stream can allow Arctic blasts to travel south in winter and can stall weather systems in the summer, among other effects.

“On the East Coast of the United States where the other part of the wave comes down,” Dr. Osborne said, “you have these Arctic air temperatures that are surging over into the lower latitudes and causing these crazy winter storms.”

The rapid warming in the upper north, known as Arctic amplification, is tied to many factors, including the simple fact that snow and ice reflect a lot of sunlight, while open water, which is darker, absorbs more heat. As sea ice melts, less ice and more open water create a “feedback loop” of more melting that leads to progressively less ice and more open water.

And as Arctic waters become increasingly ice-free, there are commercial and geopolitical implications: New shipping routes may open, and rivalries with other countries, including Russia, are intensifying.

What on Earth Is Going On? Sea ice is diminishing, quickly.

The federal government has issued the report card since 2006. It has continued to do so under the Trump administration, which has approved other scientific reports about global warming and the human greenhouse gas emissions that cause it, despite President Trump’s rejection of climate science.

Over all, “the effects of persistent Arctic warming continue to mount,” the new report said. “Continued warming of the Arctic atmosphere and ocean are driving broad change in the environmental system in predicted and, also, unexpected ways.”

Some of the findings in the research, provided by 81 scientists in 12 countries, included:

The wintertime maximum extent of sea ice in the region, in March of this year, was the second lowest in 39 years of record keeping.

Ice that persists year after year, forming thick layers, is disappearing from the Arctic. This is important because the very old ice tends to resist melting; without it, melting accelerates. Old ice made up less than 1 percent of the Arctic ice pack this year, a decline of 95 percent over the last 33 years.

Donald K. Perovich, a sea-ice expert at Dartmouth College who contributed to the report, said the “big story” for ice this year was in the Bering Sea, off western Alaska, where the extent of sea ice reached a record low for virtually the entire winter. During two weeks in February, normally a time when sea ice grows, the Bering Sea lost an area of ice the size of Idaho, Dr. Perovich said.

The lack of ice and surge of warmth coincides with rapid expansion of algae species in the Arctic Ocean, associated with harmful blooms that can poison marine life and people who eat the contaminated seafood. The northward shift of the algae “means that the Arctic is now vulnerable to species introductions into local communities and ecosystems that have little to no prior exposure to this phenomenon,” the report said.

Reindeer and caribou populations have declined 56 percent in the past two decades, dropping to 2.1 million from 4.7 million. Scientists monitoring 22 herds found that two of them were at peak numbers without declines, but five populations had declined more than 90 percent “and show no sign of recovery.”

Tiny bits of ocean plastic, which can be ingested by marine life, are proliferating at the top of the planet. “Concentrations in the remote Arctic Ocean are higher than all other ocean basins in the world,” the report said. The microplastics are also showing up in Arctic sea ice. Scientists have found samples of cellulose acetate, used in making cigarette filters, and particles of plastics used in bottle caps and packaging material.

“The report card continues to document a rapid unraveling of the Arctic,” said Rafe Pomerance, chairman of Arctic 21, a network of organizations focused on educating policymakers and others on Arctic climate change. “The signals of decline are so powerful and the consequences so great that they demand far more urgency from all governments to reduce emissions.”

The report was issued as delegates from nearly 200 countries were meeting in Poland for the latest round of climate talks stemming from the Paris Agreement, the landmark climate accord that was designed to reduce planet-warming emissions.

Mr. Trump has vowed to withdraw from the agreement. At the talks, the United States joined with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Russia in refusing to endorse a major report to the conference on the effects of climate change around the world.

At a news conference Tuesday announcing the findings of the Arctic report, Tim Gallaudet, a retired Navy admiral who is the acting NOAA administrator, was asked if he or any other senior NOAA officials had ever briefed Mr. Trump on climate change or the changes in the Arctic.

“The simple answer is no,” he said.

High Temperatures in Arctic Region

Watch 25 Years of Arctic Sea Ice Melt in One Minute

From a Posting by Stefanie Spear, EcoWatch.com, December 27, 2015

Recent social media posts by The Climate Reality Project are featuring the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) one-minute video animation that tracks the relative amount of ice of different ages from 1987 through early November 2014.

According to NOAA, decades ago, the majority of the Arctic’s winter ice pack was made up of thick, perennial ice. Today, very old ice is extremely rare.

Check out the video, produced by the Climate.gov team and based on data provided by Mark Tschudi, here:

NOAA 25 Year Animated Video

Video shows 25 years of Arctic sea ice disappearing in one minute (via @NOAA). It’s time to #ActOnClimate.