David D. Zhang et al., Global climate change, war, and population decline in recent human history

Global climate change, war, and population decline in recent human history

David D. Zhang (Department of Geography, University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong), Peter Brecke (Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332-0610), Harry F. Lee (Department of Geography, University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong), Yuan-Qing He (Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Science, Lanzhou 730000, Gansu, China), and Jane Zhang (Department of Anthropology, University College London, London WC1E 6BT, U.K.)

Edited by Paul R. Ehrlich, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, and approved October 23, 2007 (received for review April 4, 2007)

Abstract

Although scientists have warned of possible social perils resulting from climate change, the impacts of long-term climate change on social unrest and population collapse have not been quantitatively investigated. In this study, high-resolution paleo-climatic data have been used to explore at a macroscale the effects of climate change on the outbreak of war and population decline in the preindustrial era. We show that long-term fluctuations of war frequency and population changes followed the cycles of temperature change. Further analyses show that cooling impeded agricultural production, which brought about a series of serious social problems, including price inflation, then successively war outbreak, famine, and population decline successively. The findings suggest that worldwide and synchronistic war–peace, population, and price cycles in recent centuries have been driven mainly by long-term climate change. The findings also imply that social mechanisms that might mitigate the impact of climate change were not significantly effective during the study period. Climate change may thus have played a more important role and imposed a wider ranging effect on human civilization than has so far been suggested. Findings of this research may lend an additional dimension to the classic concepts of Malthusianism and Darwinism.

Link to abstract: http://www.pnas.org/content/104/49/19214.abstract

Report: Some climate damage already irreversible according to new study by Susan Solomon et al., PNAS

Report: Some climate damage already irreversible

by RANDOLPH E. SCHMID Associated Press Writer, Salon

January 26, 2009, WASHINGTON -- Many damaging effects of climate change are already basically irreversible, researchers declared Monday, warning that even if carbon emissions can somehow be halted temperatures around the globe will remain high until at least the year 3000.

"People have imagined that if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide the climate would go back to normal in 100 years, 200 years; that's not true," climate researcher Susan Solomon said in a teleconference.

Solomon, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo., is lead author of an international team's paper reporting irreversible damage from climate change, being published in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

She defines "irreversible" as change that would remain for 1,000 years even if humans stopped adding carbon to the atmosphere immediately.

The findings were announced as President Barack Obama ordered reviews that could lead to greater fuel efficiency and cleaner air, saying the Earth's future depends on cutting air pollution.

Said Solomon, "Climate change is slow, but it is unstoppable" -- all the more reason to act quickly, so the long-term situation doesn't get even worse.

Alan Robock, of the Center for Environmental Prediction at Rutgers University, agreed with the report's assessment.

"It's not like air pollution where if we turn off a smokestack, in a few days the air is clear," said Robock, who was not part of Solomon's research team. "It means we have to try even harder to reduce emissions," he said in a telephone interview.

Solomon's report "is quite important, not alarmist, and very important for the current debates on climate policy," added Jonathan Overpeck, a climate researcher at the University of Arizona.

In her paper Solomon, a leader of the International Panel on Climate Change and one of the world's best known researchers on the subject, noted that temperatures around the globe have risen and changes in rainfall patterns have been observed in areas around the Mediterranean, southern Africa and southwestern North America.

Warmer climate also is causing expansion of the ocean, and that is expected to increase with the melting of ice on Greenland and Antarctica, the researchers said.

"I don't think that the very long time scale of the persistence of these effects has been understood," Solomon said.

Global warming has been slowed by the ocean, Solomon said, because water absorbs a lot of energy to warm up. But that good effect will not only wane over time, the ocean will help keep the planet warmer by giving off its accumulated heat to the air.

Climate change has been driven by gases in the atmosphere that trap heat from solar radiation and raise the planet's temperature -- the "greenhouse effect." Carbon dioxide has been the most important of those gases because it remains in the air for hundreds of years. While other gases are responsible for nearly half of the warming, they degrade more rapidly, Solomon said.

Before the industrial revolution the air contained about 280 parts per million of carbon dioxide. That has risen to 385 ppm today, and politicians and scientists have debated at what level it could be stabilized.

Solomon's paper concludes that if CO2 is allowed to peak at 450-600 ppm, the results would include persistent decreases in dry-season rainfall that are comparable to the 1930s North American Dust Bowl in zones including southern Europe, northern Africa, southwestern North America, southern Africa and western Australia.

Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said, "The real concern is that the longer we wait to do something, the higher the level of irreversible climate change to which we'll have to adapt." Meehl was not part of Solomon's research team.

While scientists have been aware of the long-term aspects of climate change, the new report highlights and provides more specifics on them, said Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the center.

"This aspect is one that is poorly appreciated by policymakers and the general public and it is real," said Trenberth, who was not part of the research group.

"The temperature changes and the sea level changes are, if anything underestimated and quite conservative, especially for sea level," he said.

While he agreed that the rainfall changes mentioned in the paper are under way, Trenberth disagreed with some details of that part of the report.

"Even so, there would be changes in snow (to rain), snow pack and water resources, and irreversible consequences even if not quite the way the authors describe," he said. "The policy relevance is clear: We need to act sooner ... because by the time the public and policymakers really realize the changes are here it is far too late to do anything about it. In fact, as the authors point out, it is already too late for some effects."

Co-authors of the paper were Gian-Kaspar Plattner and Reto Knutti of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and Pierre Friedlingstein of the National Institute for Scientific Research, Gif sur Yvette, France.

The research was supported by the Office of Science at the Department of Energy.

Link to article: http://www.salon.com/wires/ap/scitech/2009/01/26/D95V4HBG0_sci_greenhouse_irreversible_damage/

NOAA: New study by Susan Solomon et al. shows climate change largely irreversible

New Study Shows Climate Change Largely Irreversible

January 26, 2009

A new scientific study led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reaches a powerful conclusion about the climate change caused by future increases of carbon dioxide: to a large extent, there’s no going back.

The pioneering study, led by NOAA senior scientist Susan Solomon, shows how changes in surface temperature, rainfall, and sea level are largely irreversible for more than 1,000 years after carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions are completely stopped. The findings appear during the week of January 26 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Our study convinced us that current choices regarding carbon dioxide emissions will have legacies that will irreversibly change the planet,” said Solomon, who is based at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo.

“It has long been known that some of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activities stays in the atmosphere for thousands of years,” Solomon said. “But the new study advances the understanding of how this affects the climate system.”

The study examines the consequences of allowing CO₂ to build up to several different peak levels beyond present-day concentrations of 385 parts per million and then completely halting the emissions after the peak. The authors found that the scientific evidence is strong enough to quantify some irreversible climate impacts, including rainfall changes in certain key regions, and global sea level rise.

If CO₂ is allowed to peak at 450–600 ppm, the results would include persistent decreases in dry-season rainfall that are comparable to the 1930s North American Dust Bowl in zones including southern Europe, northern Africa, southwestern North America, southern Africa and western Australia.

The study notes that decreases in rainfall that last not just for a few decades but over centuries are expected to have a range of impacts that differ by region. Such regional impacts include decreasing human water supplies, increased fire frequency, ecosystem change and expanded deserts. Dry-season wheat and maize agriculture in regions of rain-fed farming, such as Africa, would also be affected.

Climate impacts were less severe at lower peak levels. But at all levels added carbon dioxide and its climate effects linger because of the ocean.

“In the long run, both carbon dioxide loss and heat transfer depend on the same physics of deep-ocean mixing. The two work against each other to keep temperatures almost constant for more than a thousand years, and that makes carbon dioxide unique among the major climate gases,” said Solomon.

The scientists emphasize that increases in CO₂ that occur in this century “lock in” sea level rise that would slowly follow in the next 1,000 years. Considering just the expansion of warming ocean waters—without melting glaciers and polar ice sheets—the authors find that the irreversible global average sea level rise by the year 3000 would be at least 1.3–3.2 ft. (0.4–1.0 m) if CO₂ peaks at 600 parts per million, and double that amount if CO₂ peaks at 1,000 ppm.

“Additional contributions to sea level rise from the melting of glaciers and polar ice sheets are too uncertain to quantify in the same way,” said Solomon. “They could be even larger but we just don’t have the same level of knowledge about those terms. We presented the minimum sea level rise that we can expect from well-understood physics, and we were surprised that it was so large.”

Rising sea levels would cause “…irreversible commitments to future changes in the geography of the Earth, since many coastal and island features would ultimately become submerged,” the authors write.

Geoengineering to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere was not considered in the study. “Ideas about taking the carbon dioxide away after the world puts it in have been proposed, but right now those are very speculative,” said Solomon.

The authors relied on measurements as well as many different models to support the understanding of their results. They focused on drying of particular regions and on thermal expansion of the ocean because observations suggest that humans are contributing to changes that have already been measured.

Besides Solomon, the study’s authors are Gian-Kasper Plattner and Reto Knutti of ETH Zurich, Switzerland, and Pierre Friedlingstein of Institut Pierre Simon Laplace, Gif-Sur-Yvette, France.

NOAA understands and predicts changes in the Earth's environment, from the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun, and conserves and manages our coastal and marine resources.

Link to article: http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2009/20090126_climate.html

MARGO Project members: Constraints on the magnitude and patterns of ocean cooling at the Last Glacial Maximum

Letter abstract

Nature Geoscience, published online: 18 January 2009 | doi:10.1038/ngeo411

Constraints on the magnitude and patterns of ocean cooling at the Last Glacial Maximum

MARGO Project Members^*

Abstract

Observation-based reconstructions of sea surface temperature from relatively stable periods in the past, such as the Last Glacial Maximum, represent an important means of constraining climate sensitivity and evaluating model simulations¹. The first quantitative global reconstruction of sea surface temperatures during the Last Glacial Maximum was developed by the Climate Long-Range Investigation, Mapping and Prediction (CLIMAP) project in the 1970s and 1980s (refs 2, 3). Since that time, several shortcomings of that earlier effort have become apparent⁴. Here we present an updated synthesis of sea surface temperatures during the Last Glacial Maximum, rigorously defined as the period between 23 and 19 thousand years before present, from the Multiproxy Approach for the Reconstruction of the Glacial Ocean Surface (MARGO) project⁵. We integrate microfossil and geochemical reconstructions of surface temperatures and include assessments of the reliability of individual records. Our reconstruction reveals the presence of large longitudinal gradients in sea surface temperature in all of the ocean basins, in contrast to the simulations of the Last Glacial Maximum climate available at present^{6, 7}.

Link to abstract: http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/ngeo411.html

Philip Goodwin et al., Climate sensitivity to the carbon cycle modulated by past and future changes in ocean chemistry

Nature Geoscience, published online: 18 January 2009 | doi:10.1038/ngeo416

Climate sensitivity to the carbon cycle modulated by past and future changes in ocean chemistry

Philip Goodwin^1,2, Richard G. Williams¹, Andy Ridgwell³ & Michael J. Follows⁴

Abstract

The carbon cycle has a central role in climate change. For example, during glacial–interglacial cycles, atmospheric carbon dioxide has altered radiative forcing and amplified temperature changes. However, it is unclear how sensitive the climate system has been to changes in carbon cycling in previous geological periods, or how this sensitivity may evolve in the future, following massive anthropogenic emissions. Here we develop an analytical relationship that links the variation of radiative forcing from changes in carbon dioxide concentrations with changes in air–sea carbon cycling on a millennial timescale. We find that this relationship is affected by the ocean storage of carbon and its chemical partitioning in sea water. Our analysis reveals that the radiative forcing of climate is more sensitive to carbon perturbations now than it has been over much of the preceding 400 million years. This high sensitivity is likely to persist into the future as the oceans become more acidic and the bulk of the fossil-fuels inventory is transferred to the ocean and atmosphere.

1. Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, L69 3GP, UK
2. School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich, NR4 7TJ, UK
3. School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol, BS8 1SS, UK
4. Department of Earth, Atmosphere and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA

Correspondence to: Philip Goodwin^1,2 e-mail: p.goodwin@uea.ac.uk

Correspondence to: Richard G. Williams¹ e-mail: ric@liv.ac.uk

Link to abstract: http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/ngeo416.html

Shaffer, Olsen & Pedersen: Long-term ocean oxygen depletion in response to carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels

Letter abstract

---

Nature Geoscience, published online: 25 January 2009 | doi:10.1038/ngeo420

Long-term ocean oxygen depletion in response to carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels

Gary Shaffer^1,2,3, Steffen Malskær Olsen^3,4 and Jens Olaf Pepke Pedersen^3,5

Ongoing global warming could persist far into the future, because natural processes require decades to hundreds of thousands of years to remove carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel burning from the atmosphere^{1, 2, 3}. Future warming may have large global impacts including ocean oxygen depletion and associated adverse effects on marine life, such as more frequent mortality events^{4, 5, 6, 7, 8}, but long, comprehensive simulations of these impacts are currently not available. Here we project global change over the next 100,000 years using a low-resolution Earth system model⁹, and find severe, long-term ocean oxygen depletion, as well as a great expansion of ocean oxygen-minimum zones for scenarios with high emissions or high climate sensitivity. We find that climate feedbacks within the Earth system amplify the strength and duration of global warming, ocean heating and oxygen depletion. Decreased oxygen solubility from surface-layer warming accounts for most of the enhanced oxygen depletion in the upper 500 m of the ocean. Possible weakening of ocean overturning and convection lead to further oxygen depletion, also in the deep ocean. We conclude that substantial reductions in fossil-fuel use over the next few generations are needed if extensive ocean oxygen depletion for thousands of years is to be avoided.

1. Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Juliane Maries Vej 30, 2100 Copenhagen, Denmark
2. Department of Geophysics, University of Concepcion, Casilla 160-C, Concepcion 3, Chile
3. Danish Center for Earth System Science, Gl Strandvej 79, 3050 Humlebæk, Denmark
4. Danish Meteorological Institute, Lyngbyvej 100, 2100 Copenhagen, Denmark
5. National Space Institute, Technical University of Denmark, Juliane Maries Vej 30, 2100 Copenhagen, Denmark

Correspondence to: Gary Shaffer^1,2,3 e-mail: gs@dcess.ku.dk

Link to abstract: http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/ngeo420.html

Dramatic expansion of dead zones in oceans likely with unchecked global warming

Dramatic expansion of dead zones in oceans likely with unchecked global warming

ScienceDaily (Jan. 26, 2009) — Unchecked global warming would leave ocean dwellers gasping for breath. Dead zones are low-oxygen areas in the ocean where higher life forms such as fish, crabs and clams are not able to live. In shallow coastal regions, these zones can be caused by runoff of excess fertilizers from farming. A team of Danish researchers have now shown that unchecked global warming would lead to a dramatic expansion of low-oxygen areas zones in the global ocean by a factor of 10 or more.

Whereas some coastal dead zones could be recovered by control of fertilizer usage, expanded low-oxygen areas caused by global warming will remain for thousands of years to come, adversely affecting fisheries and ocean ecosystems far into the future.

Professor Gary Shaffer of the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, who is the leader of the research team at the Danish Center for Earth System Science (DCESS), explains that "such expansion would lead to increased frequency and severity of fish and shellfish mortality events, for example off the west coasts of the continents like off Oregon and Chile."

Large extinction events

Together with senior scientists Steffen Olsen oceanographer at Danish Meteorological Institute and Jens Olaf Pepke Pedersen, physicist at National Space Institute, Technical University of Denmark, Professor Shaffer has performed projections with the newly-developed DCESS Earth System Model, projections that extend 100,000 years into the future.

He adds that "if, as in many climate model simulations, the overturning circulation of the ocean would greatly weaken in response to global warming, these oxygen minimum zones would expand much more still and invade the deep ocean." Extreme events of ocean oxygen depletion leading to anoxia are thought to be prime candidates for explaining some of the large extinction events in Earth history including the largest such event at the end of the Permian 250 million years ago.

Series of changes

Furthermore, as suboxic zones expand, essential nutrients are stripped from the ocean by the process of denitrification. This in turn would shift biological production in the lighted surface layers of the ocean toward plankton species that are able to fix free dissolved nitrogen. This would then lead to large, unpredictable changes in ocean ecosystem structure and productivity, on top of other large unpredictable changes to be expected from ocean acidification, the other great oceanic consequence of high atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations from fossil fuel burning.

Professor Shaffer warns that as a result, "the future of the ocean as a large food reserve would be more uncertain. Reduced fossil fuel emissions are needed over the next few generations to limit ongoing ocean oxygen depletion and acidification and their long-term adverse effects."

1. Long-term ocean oxygen depletion in response to carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels. Nature Geoscience, in press.

Adapted from materials provided by University of Copenhagen, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Link to article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090125142118.htm

Awesome MODIS image of Wilkins Ice Shelf almost breaking up in late December 2008?

Well, sorry, I guess we will have to wait till summer, but it does hang by a thread.

Image said to be from December 31, 2008, but I have no way of knowing. Please click on the photo to see details enlarged.

NASA GISS reports on Antarctic warming research by Eric Steig et al., Nature

Antarctic warming

Red represents areas where temperatures have increased the most during the last 50 years, particularly in West Antarctica, while dark blue represents areas with a lesser degree of warming. Temperature changes are measured in degrees Celsius. Credit: Image courtesy Trent Schindler, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio. Caption by Holli Riebeek.

Satellites Confirm Half-Century of West Antarctic Warming

[Blogger's note: Hank Roberts took the time and trouble to find two very useful links to information in the Nature article, which he posted in a comment on the RealClimate blog post -- thank you, Hank!]

See Figure 2 of the published article published in Nature with graphs of temperature trends for East and West Antarctica here:

http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/environmental_law/2009/01/antarctic-warmi.html

Link to the published article's supplementary information full of graphs and explanations:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v457/n7228/extref/nature07669-s1.pdf

Jan. 21, 2009

The Antarctic Peninsula juts into the Southern Ocean, reaching farther north than any other part of the continent. The southernmost reach of global warming was believed to be limited to this narrow strip of land, while the rest of the continent was presumed to be cooling or stable.

Not so, according to a new analysis involving NASA data. In fact, the study has confirmed a trend suspected by some climate scientists.

"Everyone knows it has been warming on the Antarctic Peninsula, where there are lots of weather stations collecting data," said Eric Steig, a climate researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle, and lead author of the study. "Our analysis told us that it is also warming in West Antarctica."

The finding is the result of a novel combination of historical temperature data from ground-based weather stations and more recent data from satellites. Steig and colleagues used data from each record to fill in gaps in the other and to reconstruct a 50-year history of surface temperatures across Antarctica.

Over the years, climate research in northern latitudes led researchers to believe that the Arctic is where impacts of global climate change would be seen first. Less certain is how climate is affecting Antarctica where inland temperatures are known to plunge to -112°F, and ground-based weather stations have been sparse.

It's this sparse data collection — from ground-stations on the Antarctic Peninsula and previous reports that much of East Antarctica has experienced cooling since 1978 — that led the International Panel on Climate Change to conclude in its most recent report that Antarctica is the one continent where we have failed to detect human-caused temperature changes.

With funding from the National Science Foundation's Office of Polar Programs, Steig and colleagues set out to reconstruct Antarctica's recent past. Ground-based stations have recorded temperatures since 1957, but most of those readings come from the peninsula and areas on the edges of the continent. But at the same time, scientists such as study co-author Joey Comiso of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., have been gathering measurements from a series of Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) instruments deployed on satellites since 1981.

To construct the new 50-year temperature record, the team applied a statistical technique to estimate temperatures missing from ground-based observations. They calculated the relationship between overlapping satellite and ground-station measurements over the past 26 years. Next, they applied that correlation to ground measurements from 1957 to 1981 and calculated what the satellites would have observed.

The new analysis shows that Antarctic surface temperatures increased an average of 0.22°F (0.12°C) per decade between 1957 and 2006. That's a rise of more than 1°F (0.5°C) in the last half century. West Antarctica warmed at a higher rate, rising 0.31°F (0.17°C) per decade. The results, published Jan. 22 in Nature, confirm earlier findings based on limited weather station data and ice cores.

While some areas of East Antarctica have been cooling in recent decades, the longer 50-year trend depicts that, on average, temperatures are rising across the continent.

The northern section of the Larsen B ice shelf, a large floating ice mass on the eastern side of the Antarctic Peninsula, shattered and separated from the continent on March 5, 2002, and represents a major impact that climate warming can have on the region. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory.

West Antarctica is particularly vulnerable to climate changes because its ice sheet is grounded below sea level and surrounded by floating ice shelves. If the West Antarctic ice sheet completely melted, global sea level would rise by 16-20 feet (5-6 meters).

To identify causes of the warming, the team turned to Drew Shindell of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, who has used computer models to identify mechanisms driving Antarctica's enigmatic temperature trends.

Previously, researchers focused on Antarctic ozone depletion, which influences large-scale atmospheric fluctuations around the continent — most notably, the Southern Annular Mode, which speeds up wind flow to isolate and cool the continent.

Shindell compared Steig's temperature data with results from a computer model that can simulate the response of the atmospheric system to changes in land surface, ice cover, sea surface temperatures, and atmospheric composition. He found the ozone-influenced Southern Annular Mode is not necessarily the primary influence on Antarctic climate. Instead, it appears that smaller-scale, regional changes in wind circulation are bringing warmer air and more moisture-laden storms to West Antarctica.

"We still believe ozone depletion can increase wind speeds around Antarctica, further isolating the interior," Shindell said. "But it's clear now that it's not such a dominant influence on temperature trends."

Reference

Steig, E.J., D.P. Schneider, S.D. Rutherford, M.E. Mann, J.C. Comiso, and D.T. Shindell, 2009: Warming of the Antarctic ice-sheet surface since the 1957 International Geophysical Year. Nature, 457, 459-462, doi:10.1038/nature07669.

Media Contacts

Kathryn Hansen, 301-286-8955, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

Leslie McCarthy, 212-678-5507, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, N.Y.

This article is derived from a NASA "Looking at Earth" feature.

Link to this page at NASA GISS: http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20090121/

Rosemary Morrow et al., Observed subsurface signature of Southern Ocean sea level rise

Progress in Oceanography, 77 (4), 351-366, June 2008. doi:10.1016/j.pocean.2007.03.002


Observed subsurface signature of Southern Ocean sea level rise

Rosemary Morrow^, , Guillaume Valladeau and Jean-Baptiste Sallee

LEGOS/OMP, 18 Av. Edouard Belin, 31401 Toulouse Cedex 9, France

(Received 11 September 2006;

accepted 28 March 2007.

Available online 10 April 2008.)

Abstract

Satellite altimetry data show a strong increase in sea level in various parts of the Southern Ocean over the 1990s. In this paper, we examine the causes of the observed sea level rise in the region south of Australia, using 13 years of repeat hydrographic data from the WOCE SR3 sections, and the SURVOSTRAL XBT and surface salinity data. The hydrographic data show a poleward shift in the position of the Subtropical and the Subantarctic Fronts over the period. In the Antarctic Zone, the Antarctic Surface Water has become warmer and fresher, and the Winter Water tongue has become warmer, fresher, thinner and shallower. Increased freshening south of the Polar Front is linked to increased precipitation over the 1990s. Temperature changes over the upper 500 m account for only part of the altimetric sea level rise. The CTD sections show that the deeper layers are also warmer and slightly saltier and the observed sea level can be explained by steric expansion over the upper 2000 m. ENSO variability impacts on the northern part of the section, and a simple Sverdrup transport model shows how large-scale changes in the wind forcing, related to the Southern Annular Mode, may contribute to the deeper warming to the south.

Link to abstract: doi:10.1016/j.pocean.2007.03.002

M. P. Sulbaek Andersen et al., Atmospheric chemistry of sulfuryl fluoride: Reaction with OH radicals, Cl atoms and O3, atmospheric lifetime, IR spec..

Environ. Sci. Technol., January 21, 2009

Atmospheric chemistry of sulfuryl fluoride: Reaction with OH radicals, Cl atoms and O₃, atmospheric lifetime, IR spectrum, and global warming potential

M. P. Sulbaek Andersen*^†, D. R. Blake^†, F. S. Rowland^†, M. D. Hurley^‡ and T. J. Wallington*^‡

Department of Chemistry, 572 Rowland Hall, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697-2025, and Systems Analytics and Environmental Sciences Department, Ford Motor Company, Mail Drop SRL-3083, Dearborn, MI 48121-2053

Abstract

Sulfuryl fluoride (SO2F2) is a radiatively active industrial chemical released into the atmosphere in significant (ktonne/year) quantities. The potential for SO2F2 to contribute to radiative forcing of climate change needs to be assessed. Long path length FTIR/smog chamber techniques were used to investigate the kinetics of the gas-phase reactions of Cl atoms, OH radicals, and O3 with SO2F2, in 700 Torr total pressure of air or N2 at 296 ± 1 K. Upper limits of k(Cl + SO2F2) < 9 × 10−19, k(OH + SO2F2) < 1.7 × 10−14 and k(O3 + SO2F2) < 5.5 × 10−24 cm3 molecule−1 s−1 were determined. Reaction with Cl atoms, OH radicals, or O3 does not provide an efficient removal mechanism for SO2F2. The infrared spectrum of SO2F2 is reported and a radiative efficiency of 0.196 W m−2 ppbv−1 was calculated. Historic production data estimates are presented which provide an upper limit for expected atmospheric concentrations. The radiative forcing of climate change associated with emissions of SO2F2 depends critically on the atmospheric lifetime of SO2F2. Further research is urgently needed to define the magnitude of potential nonatmospheric sinks.

* Address correspondence to either author. e-mail: mads@sulbaek.dk (M.P.S.A.); twalling@ford.com (T.J.W.).

,

†University of California.

,

‡Ford Motor Company.

Link to abstract: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es802439f

M. Sulbaek Andersen: Sulfuryl fluoride, a termite insecticide, is 4,000 times more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, with long life in the atmosphere

Termite insecticide a potent greenhouse gas

January 21st, 2009

Mads Sulbaek Andersen with Pyrex chamber

(PhysOrg.com) -- An insecticide used to fumigate termite-infested buildings is a strong greenhouse gas that lives in the atmosphere nearly 10 times longer than previously thought, UC Irvine research has found.

Sulfuryl fluoride, UCI chemists discovered, stays in the atmosphere at least 30-40 years and perhaps as long as 100 years. Prior studies estimated its atmospheric lifetime at as low as five years, grossly underestimating the global warming potential.

The fact that sulfuryl fluoride exists for decades -- coupled with evidence that levels have nearly doubled in the last six years -- concerns study authors Mads Sulbaek Andersen, Donald Blake and Nobel Laureate F. Sherwood Rowland, who discovered that chlorofluorocarbons in aerosol cans and other products damage the ozone layer. That finding led to a worldwide ban on CFCs.

"Sulfuryl fluoride has a long enough lifetime in the atmosphere that we cannot just close our eyes," said Sulbaek Andersen, a postdoctoral researcher in the Rowland-Blake laboratory and lead author of the study. "The level in the atmosphere is rising fast, and it doesn't seem to disappear very quickly."

This study will appear online Jan. 21 in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.

Kilogram for kilogram, sulfuryl fluoride is about 4,000 times more efficient than carbon dioxide at trapping heat, though much less of it exists in the atmosphere.

Its climate impact in California each year equals that of carbon dioxide emitted from about 1 million vehicles. About 60% of the world's sulfuryl fluoride use occurs in California.

Sulfuryl fluoride blocks a wavelength of heat that otherwise could easily escape the Earth, the scientists said. Carbon dioxide blocks a different wavelength, trapping heat near the surface.

"The only place where the planet is able to emit heat that escapes the atmosphere is in the region that sulfuryl fluoride blocks," said Blake, chemistry professor. "If we put something with this blocking effect in that area, then we're in trouble -- and we are putting something in there."

The chemists worry that emissions will increase as new uses are found for sulfuryl fluoride -- especially given the ban of methyl bromide, an ozone-depleting pesticide regulated under the Montreal Protocol. Sulfuryl fluoride emissions are not regulated, though officials do consider it a toxic contaminant.

The insecticide is pumped into a tent that covers a termite-infested structure. When the tent is removed, the compound escapes into the atmosphere. Sulbaek Andersen, Blake and Rowland believe a suitable replacement should be found, one with less global warming potential.

To measure sulfuryl fluoride's atmospheric lifetime, the chemists put it inside a Pyrex chamber with compounds that are well understood in the atmosphere, such as ethane. They shined lamps on the chamber to simulate sunlight, which caused chemical reactions that eliminated the compounds from the air.

By monitoring sulfuryl fluoride changes compared with changes to the well-known compounds, they were able to estimate its atmospheric lifetime.

"This is a cautionary paper," said Rowland, Donald Bren Research Professor of Chemistry and Earth System Science. "It tells us that we need to be thinking globally -- and acting locally."

Source: University of California - Irvine

Link to article: http://www.physorg.com/news151764839.html

Obama blocks some of Bush's last-minute environmental decisions

The new president stops plans to loosen a pair of controversial air quality regulations and to remove the gray wolf from the endangered species list.

by Jim Tankersley, Los Angeles Times, reporting from Washington, January 22, 2009

With a short memo on Inauguration Day, President Obama blocked plans to loosen some air quality standards and to remove the gray wolf from the endangered species list. But he did not stop several other controversial, late-term environmental regulations issued by the Bush administration -- at least not yet.

The list of Bush-era environmental rules that survived includes a major tweak to the Endangered Species Act, a first step in opening Western lands to oil shale development, leases for oil and gas drilling near some national parks, and the start of a process to allow new oil rigs off the Atlantic, Gulf, Alaska and California coasts.

Obama still holds several options for changing or reversing those decisions. All carry at least some degree of difficulty -- an apparent victory for an outgoing administration that explicitly tried to finish its rule-making early enough to tie Obama's hands.

"The number of examples where they succeeded" in that effort, said John Walke, clean-air director for the National Resources Defense Council, "far exceeds the examples where they failed."

Like Bush, Obama took office and immediately froze any federal regulations that were not yet finalized. The move halted a push, announced last week, to strip the gray wolf's endangered status in the Rocky Mountains and the Midwest. It also stopped a pair of controversial air quality rules from taking effect, including one that gave greater leeway to industrial polluters and another that declined to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from oil refineries.

It couldn't stop rules that first were published in the Federal Register and had cleared a statutory waiting period before taking effect -- such as the oil shale regulations, meant to pave the way for development leases in Colorado and Utah. Also unable to be touched was a rule that allows so-called mountaintop mining to fill stream beds with leftover dirt from mineral extraction; and a rule that allows federal agencies to forgo expert advice on whether proposed projects would affect endangered species.

The memo also does not affect the decision, announced last week by the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service, to begin a process that could lead to oil and gas drilling on parts of the Outer Continental Shelf. That's because the department decided only to begin taking public comments on the plan, not formal rule-making, a department spokesman said.

Obama could launch a new rule-making process to eventually supplant any of the Bush rules, but that could take months or years to complete. More immediately, he could ask Congress to exercise a little-used law that would allow it to overturn any of the late-registered Bush decisions or to prohibit federal agencies from spending money to implement those rules.

The administration could also drop its opposition to several environmentalist lawsuits challenging the Bush rules, signaling to the industry that the rules won't stand for long even if upheld in court.

In the case of offshore oil drilling, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar could extend or suspend the comment period on the leasing plan. Or, Obama could issue an executive order reinstating a ban on outer continental shelf drilling.

Jacqueline Savitz, senior director of the pollution campaign for the environmental group Oceana, urged the new president to reinstate the ban, which Bush lifted last summer after gas prices soared.

"Our shorelines and marine life haven't been this vulnerable since the early 1980s," she said.

Salazar signaled mixed support for continental shelf drilling last week in a hearing before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Salazar is studying the Bush rules, said Interior spokesman Frank Quimby, and "it's going to be a while" before he decides on how to handle them.

The Interior Department must also now decide what to do about the gray wolf. Environmental groups cheered the regulatory freeze on Wednesday and urged Obama and Salazar to keep the wolf on the endangered species list. But the Western states that pushed Bush to remove it say that the wolf has recovered and that they're ready to manage it.

Jim Unsworth, deputy director of Idaho Fish and Game, said last week that his state was tired of the "roller coaster" of federal wolf protection, which has endured court fights and now a change in Washington.

"Our citizens out here are, I guess, tired of the delay," Unsworth said.

Link to article: http://www.latimes.com/news/science/environment/la-na-enviro-rules22-2009jan22,0,5900721.story

Latest research on Antarctic warming explained by Eric Steig on RealClimate

State of Antarctica: red or blue?

RealClimate, 21 January 2009

— eric @ 1:10 PM

A couple of us (Eric and Mike) are co-authors on a paper coming out in Nature this week (Jan. 22, 09). We have already seen misleading interpretations of our results in the popular press and the blogosphere, and so we thought we would nip such speculation in the bud.

The paper shows that Antarctica has been warming for the last 50 years, and that it has been warming especially in West Antarctica (see the figure). The results are based on a statistical blending of satellite data and temperature data from weather stations. The results don't depend on the statistics alone. They are backed up by independent data from automatic weather stations, as shown in our paper as well as in updated work by Bromwich, Monaghan and others (see their AGU abstract, here), whose earlier work in JGR was taken as contradicting ours. There is also a paper in press in Climate Dynamics (Goosse et al.) that uses a GCM with data assimilation (and without the satellite data we use) and gets the same result. Furthermore, speculation that our results somehow simply reflect changes in the near-surface inversion is ruled out by completely independent results showing that significant warming in West Antarctica extends well into the troposphere. And finally, our results have already been validated by borehole thermometery — a completely independent method — at at least one site in West Antarctica (Barrett et al. report the same rate of warming as we do, but going back to 1930 rather than 1957; see the paper in press in GRL).

Here are some important things the paper does NOT show:

1) Our results do not contradict earlier studies suggesting that some regions of Antarctica have cooled. Why? Because those studies were based on shorter records (20-30 years, not 50 years) and because the cooling is limited to the East Antarctic. Our results show this too, as is readily apparent by comparing our results for the full 50 years (1957-2006) with those for 1969-2000 (the dates used in various previous studies), below.

2) Our results do not necessarily contradict the generally-accepted interpretation of recent East Antarctic cooling put forth by David Thompson (Colorado State) and Susan Solomon (NOAA Aeronomy Lab). In an important paper in Science, they presented evidence that this cooling trend is linked to an increasing trend in the strength of the circumpolar westerlies, and that this can be traced to changes in the stratosphere, mostly due to photochemical ozone losses. Substantial ozone losses did not occur until the late 1970s, and it is only after this period that significant cooling begins in East Antarctica.

3) Our paper — by itself — does not address whether Antarctica's recent warming is part of a longer term trend. There is separate evidence from ice cores that Antarctica has been warming for most of the 20th century, but this is complicated by the strong influence of El Niño events in West Antarctica. In our own published work to date (Schneider and Steig, PNAS), we find that the 1940s [edit for clarity: the 1935-1945 decade] were the warmest decade of the 20th century in West Antarctica, due to an exceptionally large warming of the tropical Pacific at that time.

So what do our results show? Essentially, that the big picture of Antarctic climate change in the latter part of the 20th century has been largely overlooked. It is well known that it has been warming on the Antarctic Peninsula, probably for the last 100 years (measurements begin at the sub-Antarctic Island of Orcadas in 1901 and show a nearly monotonic warming trend). And yes, East Antarctica cooled over the 1980s and 1990s (though not, in our results, at a statistically significant rate). But West Antarctica, which no one really has paid much attention to (as far as temperature changes are concerned), has been warming rapidly for at least the last 50 years.

Why West Antarctica is warming is just beginning to be explored, but in our paper we argue that it basically has to do enhanced meridional flow — there is more warm air reaching West Antarctica from farther north (that is, from warmer, lower latitudes). In the parlance of statistical climatology, the "zonal wave 3 pattern" has increased (see Raphael, GRL 2004). Something that goes along with this change in atmospheric circulation is reduced sea ice in the region (while sea ice in Antarctica has been increasing on average, there have been significant declines off the West Antarctic coast for the last 25 years, and probably longer). And in fact this is self reinforcing (less sea ice, warmer water, rising air, lower pressure, enhanced storminess).

The obvious question, of course, is whether those changes in circulation are themselves simply "natural variability" or whether they are forced — that is, resulting from changes in greenhouse gases. There will no doubt be a flurry of papers that follow ours, to address that very question. A recent paper in Nature Geosciences by Gillet et al. examined trends in temperatures in the both Antarctic and the Arctic, and concluded that "temperature changes in both … regions can be attributed to human activity." Unfortunately our results weren't available in time to be made use of in that paper. But we suspect it will be straightforward to do an update of that work that does incorporate our results, and we look forward to seeing that happen.

Postscript
Some comment is warranted on whether our results have bearing on the various model projections of future climate change. As we discuss in the paper, fully-coupled ocean-atmosphere models don't tend to agree with one another very well in the Antarctic. They all show an overall warming trend, but they differ significantly in the spatial structure. As nicely summarized in a paper by Connolley and Bracegirdle in GRL, the models also vary greatly in their sea ice distributions, and this is clearly related to the temperature distributions. These differences aren't necessarily because there is anything wrong with the model physics (though schemes for handling sea ice do vary quite a bit model to model, and certainly are better in some models than in others), but rather because small differences in the wind fields between models results in quite large differences in the sea ice and air temperature patterns. That means that a sensible projection of future Antarctic temperature change — at anything smaller than the continental scale — can only be based on looking at the mean and variation of ensemble runs, and/or the averages of many models. As it happens, the average of the 19 models in AR4 is similar to our results — showing significant warming in West Antarctica over the last several decades (see Connolley & Bracegirdle's Figure 1).

A comment and response:

1. Steve D. Says:
   22 January 2009 at 4:32 AM

   On many occasions on this site it’s been said that cooling in Antartica is consistent with AGW, as the models show etc…. Now it appears that a warming Antarctica is also consistent with AGW. I am curious to know, is there any kind of change in temperature down there which would invalidate the AGW thesis?

   [Response:Why do the critics think that everything is so simple and binary, for example that we can lump all anthropogenic forcings into a simple “AGW” forcing. Guess what, its not that simple. There are multiple anthropogenic forcings that have quite different impacts (e.g. anthropogenic greenhouse gas increases, aerosols, land-use changes and, yes, stratospheric ozone depletion). Anyone who follows the science is of course aware of this. The temperature trends in Antarctica depend on the time interval and season one looks at, because certain forcings, such as ozone depletion, are particularly important over restricted past time intervals and during particular seasons. The interval over which we expect cooling of the interior is when ozone depletion was accelerating (1960s through late 20th century) and this is precisely when we reproduce the cooling trend both in the reconstruction (primarily during the Austral fall season) and the model simulation experiments discussed in the paper. Over the longer-term, and in the annual mean, greenhouse warming wins out over the more temporary and seasonally-specific impacts of ozone depletion in our simulations, and apparently in the real world. Do you really think that all of the authors and reviewers would have overlooked a basic internal contradiction of logic of the sort you imply, if it actually existed? This is all discussed in detail in the paper. Why not go to your local library and read it and perhaps learn something? -mike]

Link to RealClimate blog post: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/01/state-of-antarctica-red-or-blue/

Serious flaws in carbon cap and trade revealed by Chinese hydro-electric dam projects

China dams reveal flaws in climate-change weapon

by JOE McDONALD and CHARLES J. HANLEY Associated Press Writer, Salon, January 25, 2009

XIAOXI, China -- The hydroelectric dam, a low wall of concrete slicing across an old farming valley, is supposed to help a power company in distant Germany contribute to saving the climate -- while putting lucrative "carbon credits" into the pockets of Chinese developers.

But in the end the new Xiaoxi dam may do nothing to lower global-warming emissions as advertised. And many of the 7,500 people displaced by the project still seethe over losing their homes and farmland.

"Nobody asked if we wanted to move," said a 38-year-old man whose family lost a small brick house. "The government just posted a notice that said, 'Your home will be demolished.'"

The dam will shortchange German consumers, Chinese villagers and the climate itself, if critics are right. And Xiaoxi is not alone.

Similar stories are repeated across China and elsewhere around the world, as hundreds of hydro projects line up for carbon credits, at a potential cost of billions to Europeans, Japanese and soon perhaps Americans, in a trading system a new U.S. government review concludes has "uncertain effects" on greenhouse-gas emissions.

One American expert is more blunt.

"The CDM" -- the 4-year-old, U.N.-managed Clean Development Mechanism -- "is an excessive subsidy that represents a massive waste of developed world resources," says Stanford University's Michael Wara.

Forced relocations have become common in China as people in hundreds of communities are moved to clear land for factories and other projects, provoking anger and occasionally violent protests. But what happened here is unusual in highlighting not just the human costs, but also the awkward fit between China's authoritarian system, in which complaints of official abuse abound, and Western environmental ideals.

Those ideals produced the Clean Development Mechanism as a market-based tool under the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 agreement to combat climate change. The CDM allows industrial nations, required by Kyoto to reduce emissions of gases blamed for global warming, to comply by paying developing nations to cut their emissions instead.

Companies thousands of miles away, such as Germany's coal-burning, carbon dioxide-spewing RWE electric utility, accomplish this by buying carbon credits the U.N. issues to clean-energy projects like Xiaoxi's. The proceeds are meant to make such projects more financially feasible.

As critics point out, however, if those projects were going to be built anyway, the climate doesn't gain, but loses.

Such projects "may allow covered entities" -- such as RWE -- "to increase their emissions without a corresponding reduction in a developing country," the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in its December review.

The system's defenders call it essential for hard-pressed industrialized nations to meet their Kyoto quotas, and say the CDM's standards are being tightened.

"It's not as if we're printing money in a garage," Yvo de Boer, U.N. climate chief, said of the credits. "Lots of legitimate questions are being asked," he acknowledged to The Associated Press, but "that's why I'm happy we have a transparent process."

That transparency -- online project documents and a U.N. database -- allowed the AP to analyze in detail this exploding market, which attracts projects ranging from small solar-power efforts in Africa, to emissions controls on giant chemical plants in India and China.

The AP has found that hydroelectric projects, whose climate impact is most widely questioned, have quickly become the No. 1 technology in the CDM, and China in particular is rushing in to capitalize.

The Chinese now have at least 763 hydro projects in the CDM approval pipeline and are adding an average of 25 a month. By 2012, those projects alone are expected to generate more than 300 million "certified emission reductions," each supposedly representing reduction of one ton of carbon dioxide. Even at recent depressed market prices, those credits would be worth $4 billion.

If the United States enters the Kyoto system, as proposed by President-elect Barack Obama, it would be the biggest player in a market expected to be worth hundreds of billions a year by 2030.

Here in central China's mist-shrouded Zishui River valley, evicted farmers worry not about carbon-market billions, but about the thousands of Chinese yuan doled out to compensate them for lost homes and farmland.

Xiaoxi residents said that when they were evicted in 2005 to make way for the dam and its 4-square-mile reservoir, officials paid too little for condemned homes and forcibly removed owners who held out for more.

They said payments for losing their rights to state-owned land, where they grew beans and squash, were far below China's legally required minimum, which they said requires payment of the value of at least five years' harvests.

Residents spoke with the AP on condition their names not be used, to avoid trouble with authorities.

The dam's state-owned builder, Hunan Xinshao Xiaoxi Hydropower Development Co., defended its dealings with the people of Xiaoxi.

"The compensation standard we adopted was relatively high compared with similar projects and was in accord with government regulations," said Wang Yi, assistant to the company's general manager.

For their homes, people said they were paid government-set prices of $4.60 to $5.70 per square foot. But such payments didn't go far, even in this remote town surrounded by small tin mines and steep, wooded hills.

"What I got certainly was not enough to buy a new place. We had to borrow more," said a man who stood holding his 1-year-old grandson in a street lined with new apartment buildings where some relocated families have moved.

He said officials refused to discuss compensation for thousands of yuan he had spent to fix up his family's house. "I refused their offer, but they forced us out and demolished it," he said.

The dam company says local surveys found overwhelming support for the project, with 97 percent of 212 respondents saying they were satisfied with their compensation. But people interviewed in Xiaoxi said they were not contacted for such surveys.

The CDM money has spawned an industry of consultants who help Chinese companies assemble bids for emissions credits, and of U.N.-certified "validators," firms that then attest that projects meet U.N. standards.

For Xiaoxi, the developer hired Germany's TUEV-SUED as validator, and then commissioned it again later to confirm that the project complied with European Union and German government requirements on "stakeholder consultation" -- that local people approve of the project beforehand.

The TUEV-SUED report acknowledged that "the concerned villagers and their leaders were not involved in the decision process." But it contended the guidelines' "essence" was fulfilled because those affected "have improved their living environment."

The German Emissions Trading Authority approved Xiaoxi credits early last year, but that government agency's Wolfgang Seidel now tells the AP it is investigating questions newly raised about Xiaoxi. Julia Scharlemann, spokeswoman for beneficiary utility RWE, said it also was "making our own inquiries" regarding Xiaoxi.

A key question from environmentalists, led by the U.S.-based group International Rivers, is whether projects meet the CDM test of "additionality" -- that they contribute to making real reductions of greenhouses gases rather than be business-as-usual projects capitalizing belatedly on the CDM bonanza.

At Xiaoxi, where the dam should be operating by 2010, construction began in 2004, two years before the developers applied for CDM credits, suggesting it would have been built without CDM money.

Company official Wang counters that CDM money will help pay retroactively for expensive Italian technology needed to cope with the site's complex geology. "Without the money from trading emissions credits, the project would be unprofitable," he said.

Environmentalists also point out that hydro power has long been a national priority in China. Since the 1990s -- long before the CDM -- the Chinese have added an average 7.7 gigawatts a year of hydro power, equivalent to six Hoover Dams annually, International Rivers reports.

In other words, Chinese planners aren't suddenly replacing emissions-heavy coal-fired power plants with emissions-free dams.

The Xiaoxi project design document, in fact, says Chinese regulations would block the building of such a relatively low-output coal plant here. But that's how planners determined the "emissions reductions" from the $183-million, 135-megawatt dam -- by calculating how much carbon dioxide a 135-megawatt conventional power plant would produce instead.

That bottom line -- some 450,000 tons of global-warming gases each year -- would be added to RWE's permitted emissions if it buys the Xiaoxi credits, at a current annual cost of $8 million. And such calculations will be repeated at 37 other Chinese hydro projects where RWE will buy credits.

All told, the 38 are expected to produce more than 16 million CDM credits by 2012, legitimizing 16 million tons of emissions in Germany, equivalent to more than 1 percent of annual German emissions.

At today's low market prices, those credits would be worth some $300 million, paid to Chinese developers and presumably billed to German electricity customers, who by 2007 were already paying more than double the U.S. average rate per kilowatt-hour.

Utilities from Italy's Edison to Tokyo Electric are making similar deals for hydro-project credits in a dozen other countries, from Peru to India to Vietnam.

Rather than reduce their own emissions, "firms in developed countries are buying offsets that don't represent real behavioral change, real reductions in emissions," said Wara, the environmental law professor.

The U.S. GAO investigators said they learned that middlemen sometimes manipulate project paperwork to show a need for CDM financing, and they believe "a substantial number" of projects have undeservedly received credits.

The CDM system "can be 'gamed' fairly easily," said German expert Axel Michaelowa, both a critic and a CDM insider, as a member of the U.N. team that registers CDM projects.

But Michaelowa said the CDM remains "a crucial bridge between industrialized and developing countries." It has problems but they can be solved, he said.

Christiana Figueres, a Costa Rican ex-member of the board overseeing the CDM, echoed Michaelowa's view. She said it's crucial to encourage China in particular, whose coal power plants make it the world's biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, to build clean-energy facilities. And she counters critics who oppose dams in general because of their environmental impact.

"We cannot continue to demonize hydro," Figueres told the AP.

She and R.K. Sethi, the CDM Executive Board's Indian chairman, both pointed to reforms since 2007: A reinforced U.N. oversight staff, a validators' manual with stringent standards, and a growing number of board reappraisals of validator findings.

In two recent dramatic steps, the board suspended the CDM's most active validator, the Norwegian firm DNV, questioning its project assessments, and it rejected its first Chinese hydro project -- after registering 139 others for credits. The project wasn't "additional," the board said, rejecting DNV's validation that it was.

But environmentalists say a total overhaul is needed, shifting from project-by-project assessments that invite "gaming," to a negotiated regime whereby the developed world, through aid funds, subsidizes emissions cuts in the developing world more broadly, industrial sector by sector.

As atmospheric carbon dioxide continues to reach record levels, threatening disruptive warming this century, the CDM pipeline continues to swell, with 4,364 projects worldwide approved or awaiting approval, one-quarter of them hydroelectric.

Here in Xiaoxi, meanwhile, where project credits await U.N. approval, dam construction jobs have produced an economic boomlet, but it's only temporary and people's grievances are not.

One group, hopeful still for a hearing, has written to authorities with their plea for more yuan for farmers' lost way of life.

"We strongly request that they give us an explanation and a satisfactory resolution," they wrote.

------

Joe McDonald reported from China, and Charles J. Hanley from New York. Associated Press Writer Patrick McGroarty in Berlin contributed.

Link to article: http://www.salon.com/wires/ap/world/2009/01/25/D95U85900_china_s_golden_dams/index.html

Chinook salmon 2008 crash and possible recovery in 2009 due to Pacific Decadal Oscillation flip

Will the salmon be back in 2009?

Climate change may help explain the historic collapse of the species. Yet ocean experts see signs that idle fishermen can fire up their boats again.

by Jacoba Charles, Salon, January 7, 2009

As winter chills the rivers and streams of California and Oregon, a beleaguered batch of chinook salmon has finally finished its long trip home from the Pacific Ocean. In the gravel of gentle rapids and shaded pools, eggs laid by a decimated group of females are growing, starting the next generation of chinook on their turbulent journey to the ocean and back.

For their part, Pacific fishermen can only hope for the best. After all, it would be tough for things to get worse. In 2008, both commercial and sport fishing for the salmon was completely shut down along the coast from Southern California to northern Oregon for the first time in history.

"This was the first time that I sat around San Francisco and wasn't out there catching wild California king salmon," says Larry Collins, one of roughly 1,500 commercial fishermen forced to spend summer on dry land.

Collins and his fellow anglers blame debased rivers for the collapse of one of the country's prime salmon fisheries. An onslaught of dams and diversions that channel water to suburbs and subsidized crops has depleted fresh water for the fish. The Central Valley river system has historically produced one of the largest runs of chinook in the continental United States. Yet in 2008 roughly 90 percent fewer salmon returned to spawn than in 2004.

"The cities, farms and all the other users have over-drafted the river," says Collins. "Every time you take another acre-foot out of the delta, you put another nail in the coffin of the commercial fishermen of California."

For decades, fishermen and environmentalists have directed their ire at the degradation of rivers. But in the last year, marine biologists have focused on increasingly stressed oceans as the cause of the crash. Yet surprisingly, as 2009 dawns, salmon experts see signs that idle fishermen can start firing up their boats again in the coming year.

Bruce MacFarlane of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) Salmon Ecology Team in Santa Cruz explains that the historic 2008 crash begins with the fact "that ocean conditions weren't good when the salmon went to sea." Salmon need the right food in the right places to thrive to maturity in the ocean. Those needs weren't met for 2008's salmon run, whether the cause is global warming, as many scientists suggest, or simply the natural variability of the environment. And, of course, the rivers are still a major player. If the salmon population wasn't already in a weakened state, there would have been more survivors left to spawn the next generation.

"A natural period of poor ocean conditions hurts the salmon more than it did historically," says Peter Moyle, a fisheries biologist at the University of California Davis. "Under normal circumstances, you would have so many fish coming out that they could more or less overwhelm the poor ocean conditions."

Yet the common thread in the failure of the salmon seems to be the sea. Coho and chinook salmon from up and down the coast -- not just from one river or river system -- all declined. "When you start looking at what they have in common, it is that they share the same ocean at the same time," says MacFarlane.

The unfavorable conditions weren't in 2008 and 2007 when adult salmon failed to return from the sea -- but three years earlier, when the fish were only a few months old and the ocean's food chain fell apart.

"Salmon went to sea expecting the usual bountiful harvest, and they found a desert instead," says Bill Peterson, a NOAA fisheries biologist based at Oregon State University's Hatfield Marine Science Center who has been studying the local oceans for 30 years. "I think they were dead within a couple of weeks."

A signal of distress came in 2005, says Bill Sydeman, chief scientist with the Farallon Institute. The Cassin's auklet, a seabird that feeds on the same prey that young salmon do, failed to produce a single chick on the ecologically vibrant Farallon Islands. Located nearly 30 miles off the coast of San Francisco, these rocky islands are a well-studied seabird sanctuary. Around the same time, fisherman also noticed the lack of krill -- a favorite food source for juvenile chinook, and an important part of the oceanic food chain.

"There were a couple of years when we saw hardly any krill at all," says veteran California fisherman Chuck Wise. "When there's a lot around you'll see big clouds of it on the surface. The water will almost be red and it will come up on your trolling wires."

The ocean is vastly changeable -- having ups and downs is par for the course. So what exactly went so terribly wrong in the last few years?

The Pacific Fishery Management Council, one of eight regional councils of federal and state officials whose task is to oversee conservation and management of marine fisheries in the country, developed a list of 64 different factors, such as wind direction and water temperature, that could have contributed to the collapse.

While marine biologists say the salmon crash can't be blamed on any single factor -- "That's not how it works in ecology," says Sydeman -- the key problems stem from oceanic processes called "upwelling" and "retention." Upwelling refers to the process in which winds from the north push water away from the coast every spring and summer. The warmer surface water is then replaced by cold water that comes up from the depths and carries abundant nutrients such as nitrates, phosphates and silicates.

These nutrients feed the plankton, which then bloom into massive populations. Because the process happens on a relatively regular schedule, many animals -- such as salmon and Cassin's auklets -- have evolved to depend on these massive, seasonal influxes of food.

Juvenile fall-run chinook salmon migrate into the open ocean from the relative stability of their home streams and estuaries between April and June. They almost always find abundant food waiting for them, given that upwelling begins in March and April, and lasts all summer. But in 2005 and 2006, the ocean broke the rules. In 2006, upwelling started early -- in February -- and then it stopped, occurring only sporadically throughout the summer. In 2005, the upwelling simply didn't start until mid-summer.

As a consequence, auklets and other marine life that depend on the same food as salmon simply starved to death. Scientists think the same thing happened to the chinook, says Brian Wells, a NOAA scientist based out of the Southwest Fisheries Science Center in Santa Cruz.

In addition to the sparse and ill-timed upwelling, intense winds pushed what little food there was far offshore, according to Wells, who has spent the past few years studying ocean conditions in the California Central Coast region. He modeled the production rates of krill, seabirds and rockfish for up to 30 years and correlated them with staggering quantities of data on environmental conditions, looking for a relationship with how the salmon population relates to changes in the ecosystem from year to year. He found that in 2005 and 2006, remarkably low amounts of food were retained near the shore.

"Just because food is out there doesn't mean it's accessible," Sydeman says. "Predators such as salmon seem to do best when the krill are in very large patches, even if there are fewer patches. And they have to be in the right place."

Some scientists -- such as Peterson -- also suggest that the vagaries of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) correlate with the hardships confronted by the salmon. The PDO describes sea surface temperatures for a vast swath of the Pacific Ocean, north of Mexico. As a result of winds, the ocean will sometimes be warm near the coast and cold in the middle, and then flip-flop so water near the coast is cold instead. "When the ocean is in cold phase, salmon do really well, and when it's in warm phase, salmon do horribly," says Peterson. But in the last decade, he added, the PDO has "gotten all goofy."

Based on more than 100 years of data, scientists say each PDO phase generally lasts for 20 or 30 years. Now, instead of multi-decadal cycles, the flip-flopping has been happening every few years. A 20-year warm phase ended in 1999, followed by three years of cold phase. From 2003 to 2006, during the time when the salmon were suffering, it was warm again. Since then, it has returned to a cold phase. Whether these changes indicate a temporary variation or a long-term trend won't be known for years, says MacFarlane.

The warmer sea surface temperatures that are inherently an aspect of poor upwelling are also a problem for salmon. The fish need much more food to survive in warm waters, whether or not they are associated with the PDO, MacFarlane adds. Some say this is due to plankton, the tiny plants and animals that myriad sea creatures -- including salmon, squid, seabirds and whales -- rely on for food. Some eat the plant plankton directly; some eat the animal plankton, such as krill, that feed on the plant plankton; others eat the small fish that feed on the krill, and so on.

However, not all plankton are created equal. "The species in Alaska are like bears," Peterson says. "They're quite big and they pile on the fat so they can hibernate through the winter." When local coastal waters are chilly, Alaska-type plankton thrive off the west coast of Oregon. Some researchers hypothesize that ocean currents carry both cold water and fatty plankton down from Alaska and this is what feeds the salmon.

When the ocean is warm, the plankton are skinny and so are the fish, Peterson says. Lean plankton frequently found in the tropics take the place of the fatty, northern variety. "They're not going to be as strong, not as feisty and they won't grow as much," says Peterson. "For best salmon conditions, you have to have the right kind of water, with the right kind of plankton -- and you also have to have some upwelling."

Many scientists suggest that climate change is part of the problem. For over a decade, research has predicted that global warming could lead to upwelling that was strong, but occurring late -- as well as less food retention along the coast. "They actually suggested we would see a trend like we have been seeing in the last few years," says Wells.

"I'm confident that climate change is leading to changes in the environment, and starting to affect lots of food webs in a lot of different ways," says Sydeman. He adds that 2002 saw the highest levels of both salmon and Cassin's auklet reproduction on record, while the lowest rate for both came just a few years later in 2005. "Things are getting more and more variable, which is one of the predictions of global warming -- that the systems are going to get less predictable," he says.

Yet other scientists say there is not yet any clear evidence that upwelling, retention or the PDO are being affected by climate change. "We don't have a long enough time series to see if there's a relationship between oceanographic conditions and greenhouse gases," explains MacFarlane. Predictive models disagree widely about how specific places in the ocean are going to fare in the future, he adds.

Whatever their cause, the ocean conditions triggering the 2008 crash have eased up -- at least for now. Fortunately for fish and fishermen alike, conditions improved in 2007, and 2008 yielded abundant upwelling, cold waters and vibrant life in the sea. Krill were abundant; whales and porpoises fat and feeding; and seabird colonies thrived.

"The ocean looks in better condition now than I've seen in 25 years, except for the salmon," Collins says. "There's more rock cod, more marine mammal predators, and the sardines are back. The ocean is full of life."

It looks like this is going to be "a great year to be a baby salmon," says MacFarlane. "I hope that turns out to be true; we really need good ocean conditions and low predation to start rebuilding that stock."

Still, say the scientists, the future of the salmon, and the seas, remains precarious. Oceans worldwide face the long-term problems of acidification, pollution and hypoxia. Freshwater rivers are increasingly stressed. And regions of the ocean that are still generally healthy, such as those off the California and Oregon coast, have proved how vulnerable they are to short-term variability.

"It's kind of a cheat out to say that it's all better, because I'm not sure that it is," says Wells. "Just because 2008 was OK doesn't mean that 2009 will be."

Link to article: http://www.salon.com/env/feature/2009/01/07/return_of_salmon/print.html

Treasure Island, San Francisco, California, to be protected from sea level rise

Treasure Island to be protected from rising seas

by John Upton, San Francisco Examiner Staff Writer, January 21, 2009

Vulnerable: Parts of San Francisco’s man-made island may be elevated with fill to protect developments scheduled to be built in 2010. Getty Images File Photo SAN FRANCISCO – Dirt and other fill may be piled onto parts of Treasure Island to protect planned buildings from sea level rise due to climate change and other factors.

A multibillion-dollar plan for the 450-acre man-made island — including a ferry terminal, retail strip, three hotels and 6,000 new housing units, including a 60-story residential tower — was adopted in 2006 by The City.

But the low-lying island is vulnerable to floods if seas rise due to climate change, according to Kheay Loke, a developer with Wilson Meany Sullivan, which is partnering with Lennar Corp. on the project.

The flood risk will be greatest if rising seas coincide with a high tide and large storm, according to Loke.

Loke and a handful of engineers and city officials presented options last week to the Treasure Island Development Authority Board of Directors for protecting new buildings against climate change-related flooding.

To protect new buildings from floods, fill will likely be dumped beneath planned development sites, according to Loke.

The fill will be excavated from some of the 300 acres of island that’s slated to be used for parkland and sports fields, and additional fill will be imported to the island, according to Loke.

“It’s all about raising grades to enable gravity drainage, as opposed to relying on levees for protection,” Loke said.

The developers could also choose to build sea walls — which would serve the same function as levees in the Central Valley and New Orleans — around the island to protect against flooding, authority documents show.

The Board of Supervisors will ultimately decide how to protect the island from a potential 3-foot sea level rise over 70 years, according to Jack Sylvan, who oversees public-private partnership projects for The City.

Property taxes could be set aside to build sea walls, or take other flood-protection measures, if seas rise more than expected, according to Sylvan.

“The City is working on how it will address sea level rise in the future, assuming it does in fact happen,” Sylvan said.

Infrastructure work, including grading and seawalls, could begin by late 2010, according to Sylvan. Building construction is expected to start 18 to 24 months later, he said.

Link to article: http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/Treasure_Island_to_be_protected_from_rising_seas.html

R. Vautard, P. Yiou & G. J. v. Oldenborgh: Decline of fog, mist and haze in Europe over the past 30 years (global dimming)

Letter abstract

Nature Geoscience, published online: 18 January 2009 | doi:10.1038/ngeo414

Decline of fog, mist and haze in Europe over the past 30 years

Robert Vautard¹, Pascal Yiou¹ and Geert Jan van Oldenborgh²

Abstract

Surface solar radiation has undergone decadal variations since the middle of the twentieth century, producing global 'dimming' and 'brightening' effects [1, 2.] These variations presumably result from changes in aerosol burden and clouds[3], but the detailed processes involved have yet to be determined. Over Europe, the marked solar radiation increase since the 1980s is thought to have contributed to the observed large continental warming[4], but this contribution has not been quantified. Here we analyse multidecadal data of horizontal visibility, and find that the frequency of low-visibility conditions such as fog, mist and haze has declined in Europe over the past 30 years, for all seasons and all visibility ranges between distances of 0 and 8 km. This decline is spatially and temporally correlated with trends in sulphur dioxide emissions, suggesting a significant contribution of air-quality improvements. Statistically linking local visibility changes with temperature variations, we estimate that the reduction in low-visibility conditions could have contributed on average to about 10–20% of Europe's recent daytime warming and to about 50% of eastern European warming. Large improvements in air quality and visibility already achieved in Europe over the past decades may mean that future reductions in the frequency of low-visibility events will be limited, possibly leading to less rapid regional warming.

1. LSCE/IPSL, laboratoire CEA/CNRS/UVSQ, 91191 Gif sur Yvette Cedex, France
2. KNMI, PO Box 201, 3730 AE De Bilt, The Netherlands

Correspondence to: Robert Vautard¹ e-mail: robert.vautard@cea.fr

Link to article: http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/ngeo414.html