Sea ice melting in the Northwest Passage

From an Article by Jeff Goodell, Rolling Stone Magazine, January 14, 2019

PHOTO IN ARTICLE: Sea ice melts on the Franklin Strait along the Northwest Passage in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.

Climate deniers want you to believe otherwise, but the basic physics of climate science is as solid as the basic physics of gravity (or maybe even more solid, since the graviton, the elementary particle that mediates the force of gravity, still has not been detected). But there are plenty of unknowns in Earth’s climate system, such as exactly how much each ton of carbon dioxide we emit warms the atmosphere, or how different clouds can cool (by reflecting away sunlight) and warm (by trapping heat) the Earth. These uncertainties don’t mean that scientists don’t understand how burning fossil fuels cooks the planet. But it does mean there are still scientific nuances that could make the risks we face from climate change lower than scientists now anticipate – or higher.

Last week, an important uncertainty was resolved – and, like most news about climate change these days, it’s not a happy story. A paper published in the journal Science shows that the Earth’s oceans are warming at a rate that’s about 40 percent faster than indicated in the 2013 U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. Because the world’s oceans work like a giant flywheel, capturing heat energy and then spinning it out over time, warmer oceans have huge implications for everything from the rate of sea-level rise to hurricane intensity for generations to come.

During the last century, as the world heated up from pumping fossil fuels into the atmosphere, about 90 percent of the extra heat going into the climate system has been absorbed by the oceans. “If the ocean wasn’t absorbing as much heat, the surface of the land would heat up much faster than it is right now,” Malin L. Pinsky, an associate professor in the department of ecology, evolution and natural resources at Rutgers University, told The New York Times. “In fact, the ocean is saving us from massive warming right now.”

The ocean’s ability to absorb heat was no mystery to scientists. But what has been a mystery is that the ocean seemed to be warming more slowly than it should have been, given the climate models. This is important, because if a climate model can’t accurately capture the past, then it won’t be accurate predicting the future.

But actually measuring the heat content of the world’s oceans is not a small task. What matters is not just the surface temperature, which is relatively easy to calibrate, but also measuring the temperature as deep as 2,000 meters. Since the data had been suggesting the oceans were warming more slowly than climate models predicted, did that mean the models were wrong, or the measurements were off?

The authors the new paper resolved the dilemma by using new data from a network of thousands of autonomous robots – called Argo floats –that dive down to depths of 2,000 meters or so and measure temperature, salinity, pH and other ocean characteristics as they slowly ascend. Once the Argo floats surface, the data they have collected is relayed back to scientists by satellite. The upshot of this new data: The climate models were right after all, and the oceans are warming much faster than anyone understood.

The implications are huge.

Fast-warming oceans are devastating to coral reefs. Coral reefs are vanishing five times more frequently than they were 40 years ago, and will be gone entirely within your lifetime.

Fast-warming oceans intensify hurricanes. For example, one recent paper linked the disastrous rains associated with Hurricane Harvey, which hit Houston in 2017, with the amount of heat stored in the ocean. Harvey dumped 60 inches of water on Southeast Texas (the most ever recorded from a single storm in U.S. history).

The study, published in the journal Earth’s Future, argued that the added ocean heat content not only increases a storm’s rainfall but also “invigorates and enlarges the storm,” turning it into an even bigger rain-producer. Two independent studies found climate warming boosted Harvey’s rainfall by about 20 to 35 percent.
Hotter oceans also means faster sea-level rise, in part because as water warms, it expands.

But fast-warming oceans are also melting the great ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica from below, which has the potential to greatly increase the rate and height of sea-level rise. The warming of the Southern Ocean is particularly alarming, because it could destabilize West Antarctica and lead to the collapse of ice sheets that could raise global sea levels by 10 feet.

Fast-warming oceans also have big impacts on marine life. “As the ocean heats up, it’s driving fish into new places, and we’re already seeing that that’s driving conflict between countries,” Pinsky told the Times. “It’s spilling over far beyond just fish, it’s turned into trade wars. It’s turned into diplomatic disputes. It’s led to a breakdown in international relations in some cases.”

Fast-warming oceans also mean that Big Fix technologies like geoengineering and carbon removal, which are increasingly seen as last resort measures to cool the planet, will be less effective. It’s one thing to throw up a sun shade beside a pool; it’s another thing entirely to try to cool down the water in the pool itself.

If there is an upside to this recent paper, it’s this: It’s further proof that climate science — and knowledge about the risks we face in the future — are getting better, more accurate and more sophisticated. We may or we may not be doomed, but we can’t say we weren’t warned …

REFERENCE: How fast are the oceans warming? | AAAS, Science Magazine, January 11, 2019

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SEE ALSO: Ice loss from Antarctica has sextupled since the 1970s, new research finds – The Washington Post, January 14, 2014

Dr. James Hansen

 Climate Change is Already Here

By James E. Hansen, Director of the NASA

Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

When I testified before the Senate in the hot summer of 1988 , I warned of the kind of future that climate change would bring to us and our planet. I painted a grim picture of the consequences of steadily increasing temperatures, driven by mankind’s use of fossil fuels.

But I have a confession to make: I was too optimistic.

My projections about increasing global temperature have been proved true. But I failed to fully explore how quickly that average rise would drive an increase in extreme weather.

In a new analysis of the past six decades of global temperatures, which will be published Monday, my colleagues and I have revealed a stunning increase in the frequency of extremely hot summers, with deeply troubling ramifications for not only our future but also for our present.

This is not a climate model or a prediction but actual observations of weather events and temperatures that have happened. Our analysis shows that it is no longer enough to say that global warming will increase the likelihood of extreme weather and to repeat the caveat that no individual weather event can be directly linked to climate change. To the contrary, our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change.

The deadly European heat wave of 2003, the fiery Russian heat wave of 2010 and catastrophic droughts in Texas and Oklahoma last year can each be attributed to climate change. And once the data are gathered in a few weeks’ time, it’s likely that the same will be true for the extremely hot summer the United States is suffering through right now.

These weather events are not simply an example of what climate change could bring. They are caused by climate change. The odds that natural variability created these extremes are minuscule, vanishingly small. To count on those odds would be like quitting your job and playing the lottery every morning to pay the bills.

Twenty-four years ago, I introduced the concept of “climate dice” to help distinguish the long-term trend of climate change from the natural variability of day-to-day weather. Some summers are hot, some cool. Some winters brutal, some mild. That’s natural variability.

But as the climate warms, natural variability is altered, too. In a normal climate without global warming, two sides of the die would represent cooler-than-normal weather, two sides would be normal weather, and two sides would be warmer-than-normal weather. Rolling the die again and again, or season after season, you would get an equal variation of weather over time.

But loading the die with a warming climate changes the odds. You end up with only one side cooler than normal, one side average, and four sides warmer than normal. Even with climate change, you will occasionally see cooler-than-normal summers or a typically cold winter. Don’t let that fool you.

Our new peer-reviewed study, published by the National Academy of Sciences, makes clear that while average global temperature has been steadily rising due to a warming climate (up about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the past century), the extremes are actually becoming much more frequent and more intense worldwide.

When we plotted the world’s changing temperatures on a bell curve, the extremes of unusually cool and, even more, the extremes of unusually hot are being altered so they are becoming both more common and more severe.

The change is so dramatic that one face of the die must now represent extreme weather to illustrate the greater frequency of extremely hot weather events.

Such events used to be exceedingly rare. Extremely hot temperatures covered about 0.1 percent to 0.2 percent of the globe in the base period of our study, from 1951 to 1980. In the last three decades, while the average temperature has slowly risen, the extremes have soared and now cover about 10 percent of the globe.

This is the world we have changed, and now we have to live in it — the world that caused the 2003 heat wave in Europe that killed more than 50,000 people and the 2011 drought in Texas that caused more than $5 billion in damage. Such events, our data show, will become even more frequent and more severe.

There is still time to act and avoid a worsening climate, but we are wasting precious time. We can solve the challenge of climate change with a gradually rising fee on carbon collected from fossil-fuel companies, with 100 percent of the money rebated to all legal residents on a per capita basis. This would stimulate innovations and create a robust clean-energy economy with millions of new jobs. It is a simple, honest and effective solution.

The future is now. And it is hot.

NOTE:  THE ABOVE OPINION-EDITORIAL WAS PUBLISHED IN THE WASHINGTON POST ON AUGUST 3, 2012.   SEE ALSO THE FOLLOW-UP ANALYSIS OF THIS ARTICLE PUBLISHED HERE.