Seth Borenstein: This is what global warming looks like

This summer is what global warming looks like


by Seth Borenstein, AP, Washington, July 3, 2012
   A tree sitting atop a vehicle offers free firewood in Falls Church, VA, Monday, July, 2, 2012, as cleanup continued after Friday's storm, Around 2 million utility customers are without electricity across a swath of states along the East Coast and as far west as Illinois as the area recovers from a round of summer storms that has also caused at least 17 deaths. (AP Photo/Matthew Barakat)

Is it just freakish weather or something more? Climate scientists suggest that if you want a glimpse of some of the worst of global warming, take a look at U.S. weather in recent weeks.

Horrendous wildfires. Oppressive heat waves. Devastating droughts. Flooding from giant deluges. And a powerful freak wind storm called a derecho.

These are the kinds of extremes experts have predicted will come with climate change, although it's far too early to say that is the cause. Nor will they say global warming is the reason 3,215 daily high temperature records were set in the month of June.

Scientifically linking individual weather events to climate change takes intensive study, complicated mathematics, computer models and lots of time. Sometimes it isn't caused by global warming. Weather is always variable; freak things happen.

And this weather has been local. Europe, Asia and Africa aren't having similar disasters now, although they've had their own extreme events in recent years.

But since at least 1988, climate scientists have warned that climate change would bring, in general, increased heat waves, more droughts, more sudden downpours, more widespread wildfires and worsening storms. In the United States, those extremes are happening here and now.

So far this year, more than 2.1 million acres have burned in wildfires, more than 113 million people in the U.S. were in areas under extreme heat advisories last Friday, two-thirds of the country is experiencing drought, and earlier in June, deluges flooded Minnesota and Florida.

"This is what global warming looks like at the regional or personal level," said Jonathan Overpeck, professor of geosciences and atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona. "The extra heat increases the odds of worse heat waves, droughts, storms and wildfire. This is certainly what I and many other climate scientists have been warning about."

Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in fire-charred Colorado, said these are the very record-breaking conditions he has said would happen, but many people wouldn't listen. So it's I told-you-so time, he said.

As recently as March, a special report an extreme events and disasters by the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned of "unprecedented extreme weather and climate events." Its lead author, Chris Field of the Carnegie Institution and Stanford University, said Monday, "It's really dramatic how many of the patterns that we've talked about as the expression of the extremes are hitting the U.S. right now."

"What we're seeing really is a window into what global warming really looks like," said Princeton University geosciences and international affairs professor Michael Oppenheimer. "It looks like heat. It looks like fires. It looks like this kind of environmental disasters."

Oppenheimer said that on Thursday. That was before the East Coast was hit with triple-digit temperatures and before a derecho — a large, powerful and long-lasting straight-line wind storm — blew from Chicago to Washington. The storm and its aftermath killed more than 20 people and left millions without electricity. Experts say it had energy readings five times that of normal thunderstorms.

Fueled by the record high heat, this was among the strongest of this type of storm in the region in recent history, said research meteorologist Harold Brooks of the National Severe Storm Laboratory in Norman, Okla. Scientists expect "non-tornadic wind events" like this one and other thunderstorms to increase with climate change because of the heat and instability, he said.

Such patterns haven't happened only in the past week or two. The spring and winter in the U.S. were the warmest on record and among the least snowy, setting the stage for the weather extremes to come, scientists say.

Since Jan. 1, the United States has set more than 40,000 hot temperature records, but fewer than 6,000 cold temperature records, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Through most of last century, the U.S. used to set cold and hot records evenly, but in the first decade of this century America set two hot records for every cold one, said Jerry Meehl, a climate extreme expert at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. This year the ratio is about 7 hot to 1 cold. Some computer models say that ratio will hit 20-to-1 by midcentury, Meehl said.

"In the future you would expect larger, longer more intense heat waves and we've seen that in the last few summers," NOAA Climate Monitoring chief Derek Arndt said.

The 100-degree heat, drought, early snowpack melt and beetles waking from hibernation early to strip trees all combined to set the stage for the current unusual spread of wildfires in the West, said University of Montana ecosystems professor Steven Running, an expert on wildfires.

While at least 15 climate scientists told The Associated Press that this long hot U.S. summer is consistent with what is to be expected in global warming, history is full of such extremes, said John Christy at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He's a global warming skeptic who says, "The guilty party in my view is Mother Nature."

But the vast majority of mainstream climate scientists, such as Meehl, disagree: "This is what global warming is like, and we'll see more of this as we go into the future."

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on extreme weather: http://ipcc-wg2.gov/SREX/

U.S. weather records: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/extremes/records/

Seth Borenstein can be followed at http://twitter.com/borenbears

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/48054547/ns/us_news-environment/t/summer-what-global-warming-looks/

PIOMAS Arctic Sea Ice Volume Falls Off Cliff

http://psc.apl.washington.edu/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/schweiger/ice_volume/BPIOMASIceVolumeAnomalyCurrentV2.png

Peter Wadhams: When the Arctic Sea Ice Is Gone

from Sam Carana's Arctic News blog, June 27, 2012

When the sea ice is gone

How long do you think it will take for most sea ice in the Arctic to disappear? How much change in temperature you think this would result in? 

Below an educated guess from some of the members of the Arctic Methane Emergency Group. 

Professor Peter Wadhams

Peter Wadhams Sc.D., Professor of Ocean Physics
and head of the Polar Ocean Physics group at the
University of Cambridge, U.K., researching effects
of global warming on sea ice, icebergs and oceans

My own view of what will happen is:

1. Summer sea ice disappears, except perhaps for small multiyear remnant north of Greenland and Ellesmere Island, by 2015-2016.
2. By 2020 the ice free season lasts at least a month and by 2030 has extended to 3 months.
3. September sea surface temperatures are already elevated by 6-7 °C over continental shelves of Arctic. As shrink back continues, the newly exposed surface water over abyssal depths warms up less in a single summer (say 2-3 °C) because of deeper surface water layer (150 m) than over a shelf (50 m).
4. The 6-7 °C warming over the shelves causes offshore permafrost to shrink back and vanish over about 10 years. During this time there is elevated methane emission from offshore and from onshore warming, and global warming rates increase by about 50%.
5. Result is that bad effects forecast for end of century (4 °C warming worldwide, 10 °C in Arctic) actually occur by about 2060. Speed of change is catastrophic for agriculture; warfare and population crashes ensue.
6. Late in the day, the rapidly disintegrating civilised world tries desperate technofixes for warming and resource depletion, e.g. widespread use of nuclear power (thorium cycle), geoengineering. This may work, and bring us back from the brink of destruction after heavy losses.

http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2012/06/when-sea-ice-is-gone.html

Seth Borenstein: This US summer is 'what global warming looks like'

This US summer is 'what global warming looks like'

By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP, July 3, 2012 

A tree sitting atop a vehicle offers free firewood in Falls Church, Va., Mon...

WASHINGTON — If you want a glimpse of some of the worst of global warming, scientists suggest taking a look at U.S. weather in recent weeks.

Horrendous wildfires. Oppressive heat waves. Devastating droughts. Flooding from giant deluges. And a powerful freak wind storm called a derecho.

These are the kinds of extremes climate scientists have predicted will come with climate change, although it's far too early to say that is the cause. Nor will they say global warming is the reason 3,215 daily high temperature records were set in the month of June.

Scientifically linking individual weather events to climate change takes intensive study, complicated mathematics, computer models and lots of time. Sometimes it isn't caused by global warming. Weather is always variable; freak things happen.

And this weather has been local. Europe, Asia and Africa aren't having similar disasters now, although they've had their own extreme events in recent years.

But since at least 1988, climate scientists have warned that climate change would bring, in general, increased heat waves, more droughts, more sudden downpours, more widespread wildfires and worsening storms. In the United States, those extremes are happening here and now.

So far this year, more than 2.1 million acres have burned in wildfires, more than 113 million people in the U.S. were in areas under extreme heat advisories last Friday, two-thirds of the country is experiencing drought, and earlier in June, deluges flooded Minnesota and Florida.

"This is what global warming looks like at the regional or personal level," said Jonathan Overpeck, professor of geosciences and atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona. "The extra heat increases the odds of worse heat waves, droughts, storms and wildfire. This is certainly what I and many other climate scientists have been warning about."

Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in fire-charred Colorado, said these are the very record-breaking conditions he has said would happen, but many people wouldn't listen. So it's I told-you-so time, he said.

As recently as March, a special report an extreme events and disasters by the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned of "unprecedented extreme weather and climate events." Its lead author, Chris Field of the Carnegie Institution and Stanford University, said Monday, "It's really dramatic how many of the patterns that we've talked about as the expression of the extremes are hitting the U.S. right now."

"What we're seeing really is a window into what global warming really looks like," said Princeton University geosciences and international affairs professor Michael Oppenheimer. "It looks like heat. It looks like fires. It looks like this kind of environmental disasters."

Oppenheimer said that on Thursday. That was before the East Coast was hit with triple-digit temperatures and before a derecho — an unusually strong, long-lived and large straight-line wind storm — blew through Chicago to Washington. The storm and its aftermath killed more than 20 people and left millions without electricity. Experts say it had energy readings five times that of normal thunderstorms.

Fueled by the record high heat, this was one of the most powerful of this type of storm in the region in recent history, said research meteorologist Harold Brooks of the National Severe Storm Laboratory in Norman, Okla. Scientists expect "non-tornadic wind events" like this one and other thunderstorms to increase with climate change because of the heat and instability, he said.

Such patterns haven't happened only in the past week or two. The spring and winter in the U.S. were the warmest on record and among the least snowy, setting the stage for the weather extremes to come, scientists say.

Since Jan. 1, the United States has set more than 40,000 hot temperature records, but fewer than 6,000 cold temperature records, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Through most of last century, the U.S. used to set cold and hot records evenly, but in the first decade of this century America set two hot records for every cold one, said Jerry Meehl, a climate extreme expert at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. This year the ratio is about 7 hot to 1 cold. Some computer models say that ratio will hit 20-to-1 by midcentury, Meehl said.

"In the future you would expect larger, longer more intense heat waves and we've seen that in the last few summers," NOAA Climate Monitoring chief Derek Arndt said.

The 100-degree heat, drought, early snowpack melt and beetles waking from hibernation early to strip trees all combined to set the stage for the current unusual spread of wildfires in the West, said University of Montana ecosystems professor Steven Running, an expert on wildfires.

While at least 15 climate scientists told The Associated Press that this long hot U.S. summer is consistent with what is to be expected in global warming, history is full of such extremes, said John Christy at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He's a global warming skeptic who says, "The guilty party in my view is Mother Nature."

But the vast majority of mainstream climate scientists, such as Meehl, disagree: "This is what global warming is like, and we'll see more of this as we go into the future."

___

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on extreme weather:

http://ipcc-wg2.gov/SREX/

U.S. weather records set:

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/extremes/records/

http://xfinity.comcast.net/articles/news-general/20120703/US.SCI.Weird.Weather/

Is it now possible to blame extreme weather on global warming? Yup!

Is it now possible to blame extreme weather on global warming?

Wildfires, heatwaves and storms witnessed in the US are 'what global warming looks like', say climate scientists

'The odds are changing': Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, discusses the relationship between weather extremes and global warming on PBS Newshour. Credit: PBS.org

Whenever an episode of extreme weather – heatwave, flood, drought, etc – hits the headlines, someone somewhere is sure to point the finger of blame at human-induced climate change.

Such claims are normally slapped down with the much-aired mantra: "You cannot blame a single episode of bad weather on global warming." But with the on-going record high temperatures affecting large parts of the US, there seems to be a noticeable reduction in such caveats and notes of caution.

This week, scientists have been queuing up, it seems, to explain how the wildfires in Colorado, the heatwave across the eastern seaboard, and the "super derecho" are all indicative of "what global warming looks like." Most pulled back, though, from directly blaming global warming for such weather events.

"In the future you would expect larger, longer more intense heat waves and we've seen that in the last few summers," Derek Arndt of NOAA Climate Monitoring told the Associated Press." The same report added: "At least 15 climate scientists told the Associated Press that this long hot US summer is consistent with what is to be expected in global warming."

So, can we now say, or not, that specific extreme weather events are caused, or at least exacerbated, by global warming? Has anything changed in climate scientists' understanding of the attribution - or "anthropogenic fingerprint" - of such events? Are they now more confident about making such links?

I put this question to a number of climate scientists...

Kerry Emmanuel, professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology:

In my view, the only responsible statement scientists can make about this regards the probabilities of such events with and without climate change. We should be able to say something like "the annual probability of a heat wave of magnitude A and duration B before the advent of climate change was x but as a result of climate change has increased to y and is expected to further increase to between z1 and z2". It would take some work to actually fill in the numbers x,y, z1, and z2, but there are studies along these lines for events such as the 2003 European heat wave.
In my view, any statement that goes appreciably beyond statements like this one probably involves spin of one kind or another. In addition, once could talk about the particular routes by which climate change affects particular events. For example, the fires in the Rockies have apparently been affected by the ill health of many trees, owing to a population explosion among pine beetles, which is in turn partly owing to climate change.

Dr Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring and attribution, at the Met Office Hadley Centre:

Unusual or extreme weather events are of great public concern and interest, yet here are often conflicting messages from scientists about whether such events can be linked to climate change. While it is clear that across the globe there has been an increase in the frequency of extreme heatwaves and of episodes of heavy rainfall, this does not mean that human-induced climate change is to blame for every instance of such damaging weather. However climate change could be changing the odds and it is becoming increasingly clear that it is doing so in such a way as to increase the chances of extremely warm temperatures and reduce the chances of extremely cold temperatures in many places.
At the Met Office, in collaboration with international colleagues, we have formed the Attribution of Climate-related Events initiative (or ACE for short) to develop the tools needed to quantify the changed risks of extreme weather. Extreme rainfall and flooding is a particular challenge. The globally warmer atmosphere now carries 4% more moisture over the oceans than in the 1970s and in many places this extra moisture would be expected to lead to increased rainfall when storms form over land. But in some regions, weather patterns as a whole could change due to natural as well as human causes. For example, if there were a systematic shift in the jet stream, the fast flowing ribbon of air high in the atmosphere that steers storm systems, this could reduce the risk of extreme rainfall in some places. The next meeting of the ACE group, taking place in Oxford in October, will discuss the development of authoritative assessments of extreme weather risk that can be produced shortly after the extreme weather events in question when interest is at its height.

Professor Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at the Penn State Department of Meteorology:

I like to use the analogy of loaded dice. Here in the US, we've seen a doubling in the frequency of record-breaking heat, relative to what we would expect from chance alone. So far this year, we're seeing those records broken at nearly 10 times the rate we would expect without global warming. So there is no question in my mind that the "signal" of climate change has now emerged in our day-to-day weather. We are seeing the loading of the random weather dice toward more "sixes." We are seeing and feeling climate change in the more extreme heat we are witnessing this summer, the outbreak of massive forest fires like the one engulfing Colorado over the past week, and more extreme weather events like the Derecho that knocked out power for millions in the eastern US during a record-breaking heat spell.

Dr Clare Goodess, senior researcher at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit:

Over the last five years or so, a growing number of peer-reviewed studies have provided convincing evidence of a detectable human influence on the increases in high temperature extremes which have been observed over the last few decades over the globe as a whole and over large-scale regions such as Europe. Attribution of observed trends to human influences (anthropogenic climate change) requires a clear signal of change, which is stronger than the inherent natural variability of climate (so-called 'noise'), and where the different driving mechanisms of change can be separated out. Thus it is a more challenging task for rainfall and other weather variables than for temperature, and for areas smaller than continents. An anthropogenic influence has, however, recently been detected over Northern Hemisphere land areas in the largest daily rainfall events experienced each year.
These approaches to what climate scientists refer to as detection and attribution do not, however, address the questions that are uppermost in people's minds when they are personally affected by an extreme weather event. Unfortunately, I do not believe that it will ever be possible to look at a single event and say definitively if it would or would not have occurred in the absence of human influence. However, what can be, and has been, done is to estimate the extent to which human activity has increased the risk of such events occurring. It has, for example, been demonstrated that human influence has more than doubled the risk of a hot European summer like that of 2003 occurring, and substantially increased the risk of flooding which occurred in England and Wales in autumn 2000.

Dr Doug Smith, who leads decadal climate prediction research and development at the Met Office Hadley Centre:

I think it is inevitable that climate change will affect the frequency and intensity of extreme events. Weather can be characterised in terms of a mean value (the climate) and variability around the mean. Climate change will shift the mean value (by definition), and hence change the probability of extremes unless the variability also changes to compensate exactly (and there is no reason to expect this). The difficulty is in calculating the contribution of climate change to an individual extreme event. This is currently an active research area, known as operational attribution, in which many climate model simulations are made with and without forcing due to climate change in order to compute differences in the probabilities of particular events.

Michael Oppenheimer, professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School and Department of Geosciences:

The link between extreme events which have occurred recently and the build-up of the greenhouse gases is best represented by the "loading the dice" analogy – as the world warms, the likelihood of occurrence (frequency), intensity, and/or geographic extent of many types of extreme events is increasing. The events are individual data points in a broader pattern, akin to pixels on a computer screen. You can't say much from any one pixel, but a picture emerges when you step back and look at the pattern. That said, for a few types of extreme events, particularly heat waves, it is sometimes possible to connect the pixel to the bigger picture more directly. The best case is the European heat wave of 2003. According to computer simulations of climate, the likelihood that such an event would occur was about doubled by the buildup of the greenhouse gases. A few other events have been examined using similar techniques, including the 2010 heat wave in Russia.
As for the willingness of scientists to make such statements: as the climate signal due to the ever-increasing greenhouse effect strengthens and emerges more and more from the noise in the system, and as statistical techniques for doing such "fingerprinting" studies as I mention above improves, scientists have become more confident in making such claims, which is to be expected.

Harold Brooks, head of the mesoscale applications group at NOAA's National Severe Storms Laboratory:

Attribution of extremes is challenging. We're faced with separate, but related, questions. First, how much did the warming of the planet contribute directly to the extreme event? Second, how much more likely was the event because of a warmer planet? For things that are closely
related to temperature (e.g., heat waves. fires), the first question can be addressed in a relatively straightforward manner and, typically, the answers are conservative. Even with a degree or two of global warming, the direct contribution to extreme heat, such as in the southern Plains of the US in 2011 and in much of the US in 2012, is small.
The second question is more challenging to address. There are two issues that need to be considered. First is a statistical problem about how the likelihood of low probability events changes as the average condition changes. For example, if you flip a fair coin 100 times, on average you get 50 heads and 95% of the time, you'll get between 40 and 60 heads and 2 or 3 times, you'll get 65 heads. If you get a weighted coin that is 55% likely to be heads, it will 10 times as likely that you'll get 65 heads. The small change in the average chance means the chance of an extreme becomes much more likely. The same thing happens for temperature extremes, but there's another issue. Did the change in the average temperature make it more likely that the flow in the atmosphere was even more likely to occur than just by chance? For instance, when it doesn't rain much over a large area, the ground dries out and heats up. The atmosphere responds to this by flowing around the area of hot air in a way that makes rain even less likely in the hot area, leading to more heating of the ground, reinforcing the flow around that area.
For things that aren't temperature, we have to work to understand the relationship between the global temperature and the phenomenon in question. For instance, we understand that warming the planet will likely lead to a more intense water cycle, with heavier rain when it rains and longer periods without rain in between. On the other hand, our understanding of how global scale atmospheric changes affect things like tornadoes and severe thunderstorms is that global warming will make some of the ingredients for them more likely and others less likely. As a result, it appears that long-term trends in tornado occurrence or intensity are unlikely to be large. Even without the planet warming, we would expect to see some years with many tornadoes and others with few tornadoes.

Michael F. Wehner, senior climate scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory:

Whenever an extreme weather event occurs, it is natural for the public to ask, "Is this event a result of global warming?" This is not the quite the correct question to ask, as to date, all individual weather events observed could have happened prior to the human intervention in the climate system, however unlikely that may have been. The more relevant question to ask is "How has the risk of this event changed because of climate change?" 
This risk of extreme weather, particularly very severe heat waves, has already changed significantly due to human induced global warming. For instance, the chances of the 2003 European summer heat wave, responsible for as many as 70000 additional deaths, at least doubled and likely increased by a factor of 4 to 10. The chances of the 2010 Russian and 2011 Texas events also undoubtedly increased. While these events could have occurred without the human changes to the climate, it is important to know that the amount of climate change that we have experienced so far is very small to what is projected to occur by the middle and end of this century. By 2100, today's most extreme weather events will seem relatively normal.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2012/jul/03/weather-extreme-blame-global-warming 

Kevin Trenberth on PBS NewsHour: “This is a view of the Future. So Watch Out!”

“This is a view of the Future. So Watch Out!” – Kevin Trenberth on PBS NewsHour

by Peter Sinclair, Climate Crocks, July 3, 2012

Lack of water, “the great air conditioner,” is causing unusually high temperatures and extreme weather events in the United States, Kevin Trenberth with the National Center for Atmospheric Research tells Judy Woodruff.  Dr. Trenberth knocks it out of the park here.

It’s striking that Judy Woodruff, the interviewer, maintains to the end an all-to-characteristic checked-out journalist view from nowhere – “Well, that ought to be something to keep you scientists busy.”  Earth to Judy – Colorado is burning. Trenberth, to his credit does not let it slide.

NewsHour update on the recent rash of storms and heat below.

http://climatecrocks.com/2012/07/03/whats-causing-hot-temperatures-kevin-trenberth-on-pbs-newshour/

Arctic sea ice concentration meltdown, June 27, 2011, compared to June 27, 2012

Courtesy of AMEG's Peter Carter:

In pure "1984" newspeak Shell says it will "encounter" oil it will spill in the Arctic

Shell Clarifies: It Can ‘Encounter’ 95 Percent Of An Arctic Oil Spill, Not Collect It

by Joe Smyth, guest blogger, Climate Progress, July 2, 2012

As Shell’s rigs head toward the Arctic to exploit melting sea ice to drill for more oil, the company took a small step this weekend in clarifying what would happen in an oil spill during the company’s planned Arctic drilling operations this summer.

Despite the oil industry’s spin, experts know it is impossible to recover more than a small fraction of a major marine oil spill, as retired Coast Guard Admiral Roger Rufe told NPR: “But once oil is in the water, it’s a mess. And we’ve never proven anywhere in the world — let alone in the ice — that we’re very good at picking up more than 3 or 5 or 10 percent of the oil once it’s in the water.”

So how is it possible, according to the New York Times, that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar “said he believed the company’s claims that it could collect at least 90% of any oil spilled in the event of a well blowout.” These sorts of claims have raised eyebrows among advocates and scientists who study offshore oil drilling — they aren’t just unbelievable, they’re laughably, outrageously impossible. NPR’s Richard Harris cuts through Shell’s spin, and explains what these numbers really mean:

“They have a miniscule number of boats compared to what was available in the Gulf of Mexico,” [Peter Van Tuyn, and environmental lawyer in Anchorage] says, and in the Gulf, “they didn’t have to deal with the extreme weather conditions that we’ve got in the Arctic.” High winds are the norm, and sea ice is always a possible hazard, “and yet they [Shell] claim they can collect as much as 95%.”

Merrell says the company has made no such claim. Instead, he says, the oil company’s plan is to confront 95% of the oil out in the open water, before it comes ashore. That doesn’t mean responders can collect what they encounter.

“Because the on-scene conditions can be so variable, it would be rather ridiculous of us to make any kind of performance guarantee,” Merrell says.

While discussing the same issue with the Associated Press, Shell PR folks take another word out for a spin, and even try to blame “opposition groups” for this confusion:

Shell Alaska spokesman Curtis Smith said opposition groups are purposely mischaracterizing Shell’s oil spill response plan. The plan does not claim Shell can clean up 90 percent of an oil spill, he said.

“We say in our plan we expect to ‘encounter’ 90% of any discharge on site — very close to the drilling rig,” he said. “We expect to encounter 5% near-shore between the drilling rig and the coast. And we expect to encounter another 5% on shore. We never make claims about the percent we could actually recover, because conditions vary, of course.”

Where Shell plans to drill in the Arctic, those conditions include 20-foot swells, hurricane force winds, sea ice, and months of total darkness, and all without deep water ports or other infrastructure needed to mount a major oil spill response. But let’s put that aside for a moment, to make sure we’re not mischaracterizing here: Shell expects to “encounter” or “confront” 90% of the spilled oil and another 5% the company plans to — rendezvous? — with elsewhere in the ocean, while the remaining 5% Shell might — happen upon? — on shore. How much of that oil might be recovered, collected, or, you know, removed from the environment? Well, Shell says conditions vary, so making a performance guarantee would be rather ridiculous.

In the relatively calm conditions of the Gulf of Mexico, with thousands of response vessels, only a small fraction was recovered from the BP oil disaster. Despite shameful efforts to spin its announcement, a government report found that 4% of the oil was skimmed, and another 6% was burned. And as oil spill expert Rick Steiner observes, even those estimates might be too high, and burning oil isn’t really removing it from the environment: “It either went into the air as atmospheric emissions, and some of that is pretty toxic stuff, or there’s a residue from burning crude that sinks to the ocean floor, sometimes in big thick mats.”

Exxon Valdez oil in 2012. Photo courtesy of David Janka, taken on May 24, 2012, on Eleanor Island, Prince William Sound, Alaska.

And the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska’s Prince William Sound? Steiner explains in “Exxon Valdez Oil Spill a Cautionary Tale for Arctic Ocean Drilling:

And today, 23 years later, most of the fish and wildlife populations and habitats injured by the spill have yet to fully recover, and there is still residual, toxic oil in beach sediments. It is becoming evident that the injured Alaska coastal ecosystem may never fully recover from the Exxon Valdez spill.”

What of the promised “state-of-the-art spill response”? Despite a three-year, $2 billion effort by Exxon, the response was a spectacular failure, recovering less than 7 percent of the spilled oil.

Oil that Exxon might have “encountered” decades ago, still remains today, as do the impacts to the ecosystem and the wildlife and communities that depend upon it.

Joe Smyth is a Media Officer with Greenpeace.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/07/02/509453/shell-clarifies-it-can-encounter-95-percent-of-an-arctic-oil-spill-not-collect-it/

US Coast Guard Creates 'Protest-Free Zone' in Alaska Oil Drilling Zone, Greenpeace director Kumi Naidoo states,"It is only when decent men and women said 'enough is enough' and 'no more' and were prepared to put their lives on the line and go to prison if necessary, and that is where we are. We have to intensify civil disobedience."

US Coast Guard Creates 'Protest-Free Zone' in Alaska Oil Drilling Zone

by Common Dreams staff, June 29, 2012

The United States Coast Guard will establish and enforce "a 500-meter safety zone" around the Shell Oil Company's drilling vessel Noble Discoverer as it drills exploratory offshore wells in the sensitive Arctic waters off the coast of Alaska beginning this July.

US Coast Guard ice-breaker in the Beaufort Sea. The USCG has vowed to create a barrier between environmentalists and Shell Oil, who will begin drilling exploratory wells in sensitive Arctic waters this summer. (USCG)In documents just obtained by Cryptome, the USCG says that "request for the temporary safety zone was made by Shell Exploration & Production Company due to safety concerns for both the personnel aboard the Noble Discoverer and the environment."

The 'buffer zone' would apply to all vessels, but the 'special rules' are clearly designed to make it more difficult for those trying to protest against the Shell's oil drilling in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas this summer. "For any group or individual intending to conduct lawful demonstrations in the vicinity of the Noble Discoverer," reads the USCG memo, "These demonstrations must be conducted outside the safety zone."

"We have been warned there will be severe penalties but I now serve notice on Shell that we are at the point where, if needs be, we will break the injunctions and pay the price of that."
-Kumi Naidoo, Greenpeace

Earlier this year a federal judge specifically forbade the environmental group Greenpeace from coming within a 1,000 meters of Shell's drilling vessel while stationed in Puget Sound in Washington state.

While acknowledging the negative impact on the "environment and indigenous people" a mid-ocean collision caused by environmental activists attempting to block or board the ship could have in the Arctic, the USCG report made no mention of what impact a massive oil spill in the area would have on the same.

Though public comments on the rule were accepted by the USCG, only three comments were submitted and no public hearings were held on the issue.  In a separate Department of Homeland Security document, also posted by Cryptome, the USCG was allowed to skip public comment because "immediate action [was] necessary to protect the public from the threat to navigational safety posed by" the tactics of environmental activists.

Reporting by the Courthouse News Service clarifies that the Puget Sound safety zones created by the USCG are separate from those established by the federal judge in Alaska earlier this year, which specifically prohibit Greenpeace from coming within 500 to 1,000 meters of the ships when they are within 12 miles of shore. The Coast Guard stressed that it is not required to enforce that injunction and that its rules apply to all vessels whether or not they are acting on behalf of Greenpeace.

During recent comments made at the Rio+20 Earth Summit, Greenpeace director Kumi Naidoo, who was arrested last year for scaling a drilling ship in the Arctic waters off Greenland, said that his organization would be not discouraged or intimidated by such injunctions.

"We have been warned there will be severe penalties but I now serve notice on Shell that we are at the point where, if needs be, we will break the injunctions and pay the price of that," he said.

Arguing the danger of allowing Arctic drilling was too high to ignore, Naidoo said his group would intensify its efforts, not soften them. "It is only when decent men and women said 'enough is enough' and 'no more' and were prepared to put their lives on the line and go to prison if necessary, and that is where we are. We have to intensify civil disobedience."

* * *

Shell Oil Company's drilling vessel Noble Discoverer will begin drilling exploratory offshore wells in the sensitive Arctic waters off the coast of Alaska in July.https://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/06/29-2

Sam Carana, Arctic News: Earth on Fire

Earth on Fire

by Sam Carana, Arctic News, June 30, 2012

Two people have died in the wildfire in Colorado Springs, 347 homes have been destroyed, and more than 35,000 people have been forced to evacuate their homes, in the most destructive wildfire in Colorado history, reports Reuters. The destruction surpassed the 257 homes destroyed recently by a large blaze north of Denver.

According the Wikipedia, the 2012 Colorado wildfires have now claimed 5 fatalities, over 600 homes have been destroyed and at least 202,425 acres have burned (i.e., 316.3 square miles or 819.2 square kilometers).

Below, a photo of the smoke cloud at Colorado Springs from the local Waldo Canyon fire, taken on June 26, 2012, by U.S. Air Force/Mike Kaplan.

An AP news update at USAtoday includes:
• Idaho: A fast-moving 1,000-acre wildfire in eastern Idaho that destroyed 66 homes and 29 outbuildings was expected to be contained Saturday. Some 1,000 residents were evacuated.
• Utah: More than 50 houses were destroyed.
• Montana: Authorities in eastern Montana ordered the evacuation of several communities Saturday as the Ash Creek Complex fires, which has burned more than 70 homes this week, consumed another 72 square miles. The blaze grew to 244 square miles overnight.
• Wyoming: A wind-driven wildfire in a sparsely populated area of southeastern Wyoming exploded from eight square miles to nearly 58 square miles in a single day, and an unknown number of structures have burned. About 200 structures were considered threatened.

NASA has released a map, an edited version of which is below, showing the intensity and scope of the heat wave in the western United States, with temperature anomalies reaching 12 degrees Celsius in the period of June 17 to 24, 2012. Colorado experienced the brunt of the heat wave and had eight large wildfires burning on June 28, 2012. Wyoming and Utah—other states that have seen unusually hot weather—together had nine wildfires burning.

NASA adds that this heat wave, like all extreme weather events, has its direct cause in a complex set of atmospheric conditions that produce short-term weather. However, weather occurs within the broader context of the climate, and there’s a high level of agreement among scientists that global warming has made it more likely that heat waves of this magnitude will occur.

The image on the right, edited from another NASA image, depicts the relative concentration of aerosols in the skies above the continental United States on June 26, 2012.

As the image below shows, the heat wave is moving east, with temperatures reaching extremely high values over much of the United States. The image, edited from weather.gov, shows temperature predictions in both Celsius and Fahrenheit.

The image below, edited from NOAA, shows that temperatures are predicted to reach peaks on the East Coast of over 115 degrees Fahrenheit on Sunday, July 1st, 2012.

The United States isn't the only place witnessing extreme temperatures. Fires are raging in Russia, while I recently described the danger of abrupt local warming in the Arctic.

The NASA Global Fire Map below shows fires detected by satellite from June 9 to June 18, 2012.

The image below, from the Climate Emergency Institute, shows that most of the largest climate feedbacks take place at higher latitudes on the Northern Hemisphere. 

http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2012/06/earth-on-fire.html