Breaking: Shell Oil Announces It Will Not Drill In The Arctic Ocean In 2013

via ThinkProgress » Climate Progress by Climate Guest Blogger Kiley Kroh, February 27, 2013

By Kiley Kroh

 

After a year full of mishaps and failures in its quest to drill for oil off the coast of Alaska, Royal Dutch Shell announced today that it would not pursue exploratory drilling activity in the Arctic Ocean this year. The decision comes as the Obama administration nears the end of its high-level, 60-day review of Shell’s troubled Arctic drilling program, which was announced on January 8, 2013.

 

Last year was fraught with problems for Shell as the company attempted the first Arctic offshore exploratory drilling activity in decades. Technical failures, permit violations, struggles with the harsh and unpredictable Arctic conditions, and warnings from a wide range of voices all combined to discredit the company’s claims that such operations could be carried out safely and responsibly.

 

Shell made clear it sees this announcement as a hiatus, not a cancellation of its plans to tap the Arctic reserves. Marvin Odum, Shell’s Director of Upstream Americas said, “Our decision to pause in 2013 will give us time to ensure the readiness of all our equipment and people following the drilling season in 2012.”

 

Following mishaps this year, both of the company’s Arctic drilling rigs, the Kulluk and Noble Discoverer, require substantial repairs and will be towed to Asia.  The Kulluk was damaged when it was grounded near Kodiak, Alaska, on New Year’s Eve, and the Noble Discoverer was recently cited for multiple safety and environmental violations – now the subject of an investigation that was handed over to the Department of Justice this week.

 

As articulated in the recent op-ed co-authored by John Podesta and Carol Browner, the Center for American Progress was open to the possibility of offshore drilling in this remote region provided the Administration took significant steps to strengthen safeguards and improve response capacity, and the industry could demonstrate it was prepared for the extreme risk. Instead, Shell proved precisely the opposite – the oil and gas industry is not prepared for the enormous challenge of drilling in the Arctic Ocean.

 

As we’ve detailed numerous times, there is a tremendous and incalculable risk associated with any offshore operations in the Arctic. First, the region lacks even the basic infrastructure that would be necessary to mount a large-scale response to an oil spill or other major incident – roads, major airports, ports, a permanent Coast Guard facility, adequate facilities to house and feed responders. These obstacles, coupled with the extreme and volatile conditions in which companies would be operating, led the insurance giant Lloyd’s of London to warn companies that responding to an oil spill in a region “highly sensitive to damage” would present “multiple obstacles, which together constitute a unique and hard-to-manage risk.” And Total SA, the fifth largest oil and gas company in the world, announced it wouldn’t seek to drill in the Arctic because an accident there would be a “disaster.”

 

Rushing into Arctic offshore drilling is not an imperative and thus should not be attempted unless and until independent auditors determine the industry and the government are capable of acting responsibly and responding to a true worst-case scenario. No operation is foolproof, but when even the most carefully watched drilling operations repeatedly fail to attain safety certification, then are hit with routine air pollution violations, and marred by twice letting major pieces of equipment be cast adrift, the American people have no reason to continue taking oil companies at their word when they tell us they can operate safely and responsibly in this remote and dangerous region.

 

Related Resources:

• TIMELINE: Documenting Shell’s 2012 Arctic Drilling Debacle
• Putting a Freeze on Arctic Ocean Drilling
• VIDEO: The Risks of Drilling in Alaska’s Arctic Ocean

– Kiley Kroh is the Associate Director for Ocean Communications at the Center for American Progress

 

 http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/02/27/1649531/breaking-shell-oil-announces-it-will-not-drill-in-the-arctic-ocean-in-2013/

Hot Topic, NZ: Recursive fraudery: Monckton goes mad in Australia, by Gareth Renowden

Recursive fraudery: Monckton goes mad in Australia

by Gareth on February 28, 2013

Christopher, Viscount Monckton of Brenchley’s tour of Australia must be going very badly, because the “high priest of climate scepticism” is indulging in another of his increasingly desperate displays of attention seeking behaviour.

 

After giving a poorly attended lecture in Hobart last week, Monckton took umbrage at an article in the Sunday Tasmanian (on the web here) reporting the views of Tony Press, CEO of the University of Tasmania’s Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Co-operative Research Centre, who was not impressed by Monckton’s efforts. In response, Monckton has thrown his toys out of his fossil fuel funded pram, and called for the University of Tasmania to fire Press.

 

Here’s the last paragraph from his typically pompous and ludicrous letter [pdf] to the Vice Chancellor:

On any view, Press is not a fit and proper person to be employed in any capacity at the University of Tasmania. I hope that the University will investigate his misconduct and fraud and will dismiss him forthwith.

Connoisseurs of Monckton’s antics will note that this is a well established pattern of behaviour.

 

Remember when he took exception to the comprehensive dismantling of one of his lectures by John Abraham, and tried to get him fired? Nothing came of that threat — except that Abraham was motivated to become more active in countering climate crank nonsense wherever it appears.

In his latest attack on academic freedom, Monckton accuses Press of fraud:

The multiple falsehoods by Press published in an article in the Sunday Tasmanian on 24 February 2013 manifestly constitute frauds as defined in your policy. Press’ deceptions, false suggestions, suppressions of truth and other unfair means were calculated – individually and by mutual reinforcement – to occasion loss to me and continuing profit to himself.

Monckton’s hypocrisy here is breathtaking. He is himself a fraud, as I demonstrated in this post nearly three years ago. I might also note that in order to suffer a loss of reputation, you first have to have a good one. Anyone who cares to peruse the history of his climate activities, as recorded by Barry Bickmore at Monckton’s Rap Sheet, will find that the discount viscount has a chequered past, as well as plenty of evidence of Moncktonian toy-throwing and threats when criticised¹ — none of which amount to more than a considerable waste of time for the people he attacks.

 

Not satisfied with vilifying Press alone, Monckton has widened his hissy fit to call for the prosecution of climate scientists in general — another of his favourite themes. Here he is at WND²:

A senior Australian police officer specializing in organized-crime frauds tells me the pattern of fraud on the part of a handful of climate scientists may yet lead to prosecutions.

When the cell door slams on the first bad scientist, the rest will scuttle for cover. Only then will the climate scare – mankind’s strangest and costliest intellectual aberration – be truly over.

The strange and costly aberration here is not in the state of our understanding of the climate of our planet, but in the weird and wonderful mindset of people like Monckton who think that climate science is a scam designed to usher in world government.

 

Monckton brings his conspiracy roadshow to New Zealand in April for an extensive tour of the nation’s smaller venues. I’m sure he will get a warm welcome from the dim and deluded, and the local branch of the Flat Earth Society.

1. There’s a particularly amusing recent example from the Newcastle Herald here. [↩]
2. He has repeated the call in interviews on Sydney radio station 2GB in the last couple of days. [↩]

 

http://hot-topic.co.nz/recursive-fraudery-monckton-goes-mad-in-australia/

NASA's Aquarius instrument aboard the SAC-D satellite sees shifts in ocean salinity

NASA's Aquarius Sees Salty Shifts 

by Maria-José Viñas, NASA News, No. 2013-074, February 27,2013



The full version of this story with accompanying images is at: 
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-074&cid=release_2013-074 

The colorful images chronicle the seasonal stirrings of our salty world: Pulses of freshwater gush from the Amazon River's mouth; an invisible seam divides the salty Arabian Sea from the fresher waters of the Bay of Bengal; a large patch of freshwater appears in the eastern tropical Pacific in the winter. These and other changes in ocean salinity patterns are revealed by the first full year of surface salinity data captured by NASA's Aquarius instrument. 

"With a bit more than a year of data, we are seeing some surprising patterns, especially in the tropics," said Aquarius Principal Investigator Gary Lagerloef, of Earth & Space Research in Seattle. "We see features evolve rapidly over time." 

Launched June 10, 2011, aboard the Argentine spacecraft Aquarius/Satélite de Aplicaciones Científicas (SAC)-D, Aquarius is NASA's first satellite instrument specifically built to study the salt content of ocean surface waters. Salinity variations, one of the main drivers of ocean circulation, are closely connected with the cycling of freshwater around the planet and provide scientists with valuable information on how the changing global climate is altering global rainfall patterns. 

The salinity sensor detects the microwave emissivity of the top approximately 1 inch (1-2 cm) of ocean water -- a physical property that varies depending on temperature and saltiness. The instrument collects data in 240-mile-wide (386-kilometer) swaths in an orbit designed to obtain a complete survey of global salinity of ice-free oceans every seven days. 

The Changing Ocean 

The animated version of Aquarius' first year of data unveils a world of varying salinity patterns. The Arabian Sea, nestled up against the dry Middle East, appears much saltier than the neighboring Bay of Bengal, which gets showered by intense monsoon rains and receives freshwater discharges from the Ganges and other large rivers. Another mighty river, the Amazon, releases a large freshwater plume that heads east toward Africa or bends up north to the Caribbean, depending on the prevailing seasonal currents. Pools of freshwater carried by ocean currents from the central Pacific Ocean's regions of heavy rainfall pile up next to Panama's coast, while the Mediterranean Sea sticks out in the Aquarius maps as a very salty sea. 

One of the features that stand out most clearly is a large patch of highly saline water across the North Atlantic. This area, the saltiest anywhere in the open ocean, is analogous to deserts on land, where little rainfall and a lot of evaporation occur. A NASA-funded expedition, the Salinity Processes in the Upper Ocean Regional Study (SPURS), traveled to the North Atlantic's saltiest spot last fall to analyze the causes behind this high salt concentration and to validate Aquarius measurements. 

"My conclusion after five weeks out at sea and analyzing five weekly maps of salinity from Aquarius while we were there was that indeed, the patterns of salinity variation seen from Aquarius and by the ship were similar," said Eric Lindstrom, NASA's physical oceanography program scientist, NASA Headquarters, Washington, and a participant of the SPURS research cruise. 

Future Goals 

"The Aquarius prime mission is scheduled to run for three years but there is no reason to think that the instrument could not be able to provide valuable data for much longer than that," said Gene Carl Feldman, Aquarius project manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "The instrument has been performing flawlessly and our colleagues in Argentina are doing a fantastic job running the spacecraft, providing us a nice, stable ride."

In future years, one of the main goals of the Aquarius team is to figure out ways to fine-tune the readings and retrieve data closer to the coasts and the poles. Land and ice emit very bright microwave emissions that swamp the signal read by the satellite. At the poles, there's the added complication that cold polar waters require very large changes in their salt concentration to modify their microwave signal. 

Still, the Aquarius team was surprised by how close to the coast the instrument is already able to collect salinity measurements. 

"The fact that we're getting areas, particularly around islands in the Pacific, that are not obviously badly contaminated is pretty remarkable. It says that our ability to screen out land contamination seems to be working quite well," Feldman said. 

Another factor that affects salinity readings is intense rainfall. Heavy rain can affect salinity readings by attenuating the microwave signal Aquarius reads off the ocean's surface as it travels through the soaked atmosphere. Rainfall can also create roughness and shallow pools of freshwater on the ocean surface. In the future, the Aquarius team wants to use another instrument aboard Aquarius/SAC-D, the Argentine-built Microwave Radiometer, to gauge the presence of intense rain simultaneously with salinity readings, so that scientists can flag data collected during heavy rainfall. 

An ultimate goal is combining the Aquarius measurements with those of its European counterpart, the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity satellite (SMOS) to produce more accurate and finer maps of ocean salinity. In addition, the Aquarius team, in collaboration with researchers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is about to release its first global soil moisture dataset, which will complement SMOS' soil moisture measurements. 

"The first year of the Aquarius mission has mostly been about understanding how the instruments and algorithms are performing," Feldman said. "Now that we have overcome the major hurdles, we can really begin to focus on understanding what the data are telling us about how the ocean works, how it affects weather and climate, and what new insights we can gain by having these remarkable salinity measurements." 

Aquarius was built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.; and NASA Goddard. JPL managed Aquarius through its commissioning phase and is archiving mission data. Goddard now manages Aquarius mission operations and processes science data. Argentina's space agency, Comisión Nacional de Actividades Espaciales (CONAE), provided the SAC-D spacecraft, optical camera, thermal camera with Canada, microwave radiometer, sensors from various Argentine institutions and the mission operations center. France and Italy also contributed instruments. For more information about NASA's Aquarius mission, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/aquarius . 

For a narrated global tour of Aquarius ocean surface salinity measurements, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xQP_B18vMw . A visualization showing changes in global ocean surface salinity as measured by Aquarius from Dec. 2011 through Dec. 2012 can be seen at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJVnZnZUUYc . 

Media contact: Alan Buis 818-354-0474, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.  Alan.buis@jpl.nasa.gov 

Canadian climate scientists muzzled by the Harper government -- American coworkers sort of go ballistic: Rick's Rant

RMR: Rick's Rant - Scientists Muzzled Again

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=advh4xb6gRQ

"Antarctic Bottom Water production by intense sea-ice formation in the Cape Darnley polynya," by K. I. Ohshima et al., Nature Geosci., (2013); doi:10.1038/ngeo1738

Nature Geoscience, (2013); doi:10.1038/ngeo1738

Antarctic Bottom Water production by intense sea-ice formation in the Cape Darnley polynya

• Kay I. Ohshima,
• Yasushi Fukamachi,
• Guy D. Williams,
• Sohey Nihashi,
• Fabien Roquet,
• Yujiro Kitade,
• Takeshi Tamura,
• Daisuke Hirano,
• Laura Herraiz-Borreguero,
• Iain Field,
• Mark Hindell,
• Shigeru Aoki and
•  Masaaki Wakatsuchi

Abstract

The formation of Antarctic Bottom Water—the cold, dense water that occupies the abyssal layer of the global ocean—is a key process in global ocean circulation. This water mass is formed as dense shelf water sinks to depth. Three regions around Antarctica where this process takes place have been previously documented. The presence of another source has been identified in hydrographic and tracer data, although the site of formation is not well constrained. Here we document the formation of dense shelf water in the Cape Darnley polynya (65°–69° E) and its subsequent transformation into bottom water using data from moorings and instrumented elephant seals (Mirounga leonina). Unlike the previously identified sources of Antarctic Bottom Water, which require the presence of an ice shelf or a large storage volume, bottom water production at the Cape Darnley polynya is driven primarily by the flux of salt released by sea-ice formation. We estimate that about 0.3–0.7×10⁶ m³ s⁻¹ of dense shelf water produced by the Cape Darnley polynya is transformed into Antarctic Bottom Water. The transformation of this water mass, which we term Cape Darnley Bottom Water, accounts for 6–13% of the circumpolar total.

At a glance

• Figures

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http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo1738.html

4th source of Antarctic Bottom Water pinpointed with help of tagged southern elephant seals

Tagged seals help find missing piece in global climate puzzle

Researchers pinpoint fourth known source of bottom water, a crucial oceanic heat-sink.

• by Richard A. Lovett, Nature News,

24 February 2013

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Southern elephant seals fitted with satellite-linked instruments similar to the one above helped oceanographers map deep currents off Antarctica.

MARTIN BIUW

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By tracking the voyages of elephant seals off Antarctica, and with the help of satellite imaging and undersea sensors, researchers have discovered a long-elusive source for the deep-ocean streams of cold water that help to regulate the Earth's climate.

Antarctic bottom water (AABW) is cold, highly saline water that forms near the shores of Antarctica. Being denser than typical seawater, it sinks to the depths and then moves north insluggish currents that spread across the globe.

Three sources of AABW were known until now. The first, in the Weddell Sea, was found in 1940; two others were found in the Ross Sea and along the Adélie Coast of East Antarctica in the 1960s and ‘70s. But for years, researchers have suggested that these were not the only ones. In particular, water samples from an area called the Weddell Gyre contain atmospheric pollutants known as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), indicating that the deep water came into contact with the air far too recently to have been carried there from one of the known AABW sinks.

Now, Kay Ohshima, a physical oceanographer at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan, and his colleagues have traced that water to a fourth AABW source, in the Cape Darnley polynya. Their results are published today in Nature Geoscience¹.

Polynyas are regions of open water near sea ice that are kept from freezing by wind and currents that sweep newly formed ice away. Polynyas have relatively high salinity, because most of the salt in sea water is expelled as it freezes.

Armed with the hypothesis that the missing source might be such a polynya, the researchers used satellite sensors to hunt for polynya regions where ice formed particularly rapidly. When satellite data suggested that Cape Darnley might be a candidate, the researchers moored instruments on the seabed, hoping to spot the descending current. In addition, they relied on data from elephant seals (Mirounga leonina) tagged with instruments that monitor ocean conditions.

“The seals went to an area of the coastline that no ship was ever going to get to, particularly in the middle of winter,” says Guy Williams, a physical oceanographer at the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre in Hobart, Australia, and a co-author of the study.

The elephant seals confirmed the researchers' hunch. “Several of the seals foraged on the continental slope as far down as 1,800 metres,” he says, “punching through into a layer of this dense water cascading down to the abyss. They gave us very rare and valuable wintertime measurements of this process.”

The new finding fills a gap in researchers’ understanding of the Southern Ocean’s role in global climate, “including carbon dioxide, temperature, the stability of the Antarctic ice sheet and changes in sea level", says Richard Alley, a geophysicist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, who was not part of the study.

Still, Williams and Ohshima say that the Cape Darnley polynya represents, at most, about one-eighth of the world’s AABW, and that other, similar sources might remain to be discovered.

Michael Meredith, a polar oceanographer at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, UK, who wrote an accompanying commentary on the study, says that if the total rate of AABW formation declines, the resulting changes in cold-water circulation could have important effects on global climate, letting the ocean depths warm and thereby changing the rate of heat exchange between Antarctica and the tropics. Moreover, he says, sea levels could rise — owing to the fact that water expands as it warms — and temperature changes could affect deep-sea ecosystems.

Nature

 

doi:10.1038/nature.2013.12488

References

1. Ohshima, K. I. et al. Nature Geosci. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1738 (2013).
   
   
   http://www.nature.com/news/tagged-seals-help-find-missing-piece-in-global-climate-puzzle-1.12488

Peter Gleick: (Mis)Understanding Sea-Level Rise (SLR) and Climate Impacts

Peter Gleick,  Significant Figures, ScienceBlogs, February 26, 2013

One of the most important and threatening risks of climate change is sea-level rise (SLR). The mechanisms are well understood, and the direction of changes in sea-level is highly certain – it is rising and the rate of rise will accelerate. There remain plenty of uncertainties (i.e., a range of possible outcomes) about the timing and rate of rise that have to do with how fast we continue to put greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the responses of (especially) ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, and the sensitivity of the climate.

Even little changes can have big consequences. As we saw with Superstorm Sandy, where extremely severe weather was combined with a very high tide, on top of sea levels that have risen six to nine inches over the past century, even a little bit of sea-level rise around the world has the potential to cause hundreds of billions of dollars of damages and the displacement of millions of people.

The Pacific Institute, among many other organizations, has been working to understand and evaluate the nature of the threat of sea-level rise and the risks posed to coastal populations, property, and ecosystems. In 1990, a colleague and I published the first detailed mapping and economic assessment of the risks of sea-level rise to the San Francisco Bay Area, looking at populations at risk, the value of property in new flood zones, and the costs of building some kinds of coastal protection (“adaptation”) to protect higher valued assets. That early report can be found here.

Then, in 2009 and 2010, the Pacific Institute, with funding from the State of California, conducted a detailed, high-resolution mapping analysis of the entire coast from Oregon to Mexico. We analyzed a set of sea-level rise scenarios developed by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and worked with the California Energy Commission, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the Ocean Protection Council, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the US Geological Survey, FEMA, and others to evaluate the risks to people, property, transportation infrastructure, ecosystems, power plants, wastewater treatment plants, and more, should those scenarios of sea-level rise happen. The full peer-reviewed report, the high resolution maps, specialty maps, and all open source GIS data can be publicly downloaded here. (A peer-reviewed journal article was also published.) That analysis suggests coastal regions are highly vulnerable to even modest sea-level rises with hundreds of thousands of people and more than a hundred billion dollars of infrastructure already in zones at risk of future flooding.

I was reminded this week, however, of the difficulty some people have in understanding the nature of climate risks, when a climate skeptic who shall remain nameless started tweeting his misunderstandings to me without having read our studies (I know this because after I pointed out his errors, he asked me to send the studies to him).  My internet-savvy sons have tried for years (only partly successfully) to teach me: DNFTT. But these tweets offer insights into what might be more general misconceptions, so let me address some of them for those who actually want to help the public understand the real risks of climate change.

Misunderstanding #1: Predication versus Scenario. There is a big difference between a prediction and a scenario. Scenarios are tools for examining how changes in some kind of conditions (such as greenhouse gas concentrations) might affect something else (such as climatic conditions or sea-level). They are stories of possible futures based on a range of assumptions. Almost all studies of climate impacts evaluate scenarios to examine possible future conditions, risks, and threats. Climatologist Gavin Schmidt sometimes uses the following:

• Forecast: What you think will happen in the future (could be probabilistic), but with no conditionals. Used in weather forecasts, sales forecasts, etc.
• Prediction: A much broader category of scientific statement that implies a complete specification of the circumstances under which X would be expected.
• Projection or Scenario: A conditional prediction about the future. i.e., if a certain set of circumstances come to pass, the climate will respond in the following way.

In the case of sea-level rise, climate modelers and oceanographers make projections of how sea-level would react to a range of assumptions about energy use and type, greenhouse gas emissions, and climate and ice sensitivities. These are not predictions. In the case of our reports, we evaluate the implications for coastal regions should these future sea-level rises occur. This is a risk and vulnerability assessment. In fact, for the estimates of sea-level rise in our study, we clearly note that changes could be both smaller or larger, and slower or faster than our evaluation. None of this is actually relevant to our estimate of the things currently at risk from a 1.4 meter rise.

Misunderstanding #2: Linear versus Exponential. There is sometimes confusion in some people’s minds about the difference between a linear trend and an exponential trend. In this case, data on actual changes in sea-level suggest that the recent rates of rise are between 3 and 3.5 millimeters per year. If sea-level changes are linear, then it is easy to project past trends forward: 100 years of rise would add between 0.3 and 0.35 meters. This is what my tweeter did, in an effort to say SLR is a smaller problem than the state-of-the-science 1.4-meter scenario we evaluated. Why the difference? Because climate change, and sea-level responses – are not linear; they are exponential. This means the sea level in the future will rise at an accelerating rate, leading to a much higher end point for any given year. Figure 1 shows this simple concept, but also shows that in the short term, it may be hard to distinguish between the two. A high-school student would get an F for assuming a linear rate for an exponential process. I know of no climate scientist who believes the climate will change in a linear fashion if there is continued exponential growth in greenhouse gas emissions.

Figure 1. Exponential versus linear growth. Note, for a while, it’s hard to tell the difference, but then the curves diverge dramatically.

Misunderstanding #3: Evaluating Average versus Extreme Risks. Climate scientists are a conservative lot (in the scientific sense, as shown in a recent journal article). As a result, assumptions and scenarios that are typically analyzed (including the ones we used, developed by the Scripps Oceanographic Institute) are in the middle of the range of what could plausibly occur. In particular, even the exponential rate that produces 1.4 meters of rise by around the end of the century includes no rapid acceleration of ice-sheet melt or ablation or other factors that could lead to even faster rates of increase or higher rises. There are some far more disturbing sea-level rise scenarios out there but we didn’t analyze them. Any criticism that the scenarios evaluated were too extreme could be equally balanced by criticism that they were not extreme enough. The most recent report on SLR scenarios for the U.S. offers a range from 0.2 meters to 2 meters by 2100 (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. USGCRP sea-level rise scenarios showing a range. Even more extreme increases are possible, just not considered likely. Also, note that SLR will not stop in 2100, just because the graph stops there!

Misunderstanding #4: Beware False Dichotomies and Ad Hominem Arguments. This skeptic opened his assault on the sea-level science discussion by arguing that I must not care about sea-level rise because my office was nearly at sea-level. First, a minute spent with Google Earth or a topo map would have shown that our offices are actually around +40 feet above mean sea-level – not in a vulnerable zone even with expected climate change over the next century (barring some more catastrophic scenario), and second, even if my office was in a vulnerable zone, it wouldn’t mean I didn’t care about the future risks of flooding. His ad hominem response was “OK I get it it [sic], the plan is to sit tight and laugh at others [sic] misfortunes.” I know, DNFTT.

Misunderstanding #5. Mitigation versus Adaptation versus Suffering. That same nasty tweet also reveals a deeper misunderstanding about the nature of responses to sea-level rise or any other climate impacts. We only have three options for sea-level rise: trying to reduce the rate of rise (mitigation), coastal defense or retreat (adaptation), and suffering the impacts. People and valuable property in zones threatened by sea-level rise will either suffer greater and greater damage, or will have to be protected with new costly infrastructure, moved away over time in advance of rising seas, or abandoned. These are issues discussed clearly in our studies. Moreover, our work at the Institute explicitly identifies vulnerable populations and strategies to protect them.

This particular climate skeptic lives nowhere near the coast. That could partly explain his lack of understanding or interest in the threats posed by sea-level rise to our extensive coastlines. But the risks facing his own community include growing heat stress and extreme temperatures, loss of inexpensive local hydropower generation, increased forest fire risks, greater air pollution, and, should sea-level rise get really bad, migration of lots of people to his community! More on these risks later.

Let’s put these errors and misunderstandings to rest and begin the necessary climate mitigation and adaptation responses, soon, or those exponential curves will begin to bite.

http://scienceblogs.com/significantfigures/index.php/2013/02/26/misunderstanding-sea-level-rise-slr-and-climate-impacts/

Weather extremes provoked by trapping of giant waves in the atmosphere

            

by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, February 25, 2013

 

The world has suffered from severe regional weather extremes in recent years, such as the heat wave in the United States in 2011 or the one in Russia 2010 coinciding with the unprecedented Pakistan flood. Behind these devastating individual events there is a common physical cause, propose scientists of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). The study will be published this week in the US Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and suggests that man-made climate change repeatedly disturbs the patterns of atmospheric flow around the globe's Northern Hemisphere through a subtle resonance mechanism.

 

Meridional windfield over four different timespans. 

      

“An important part of the global air motion in the mid-latitudes of the Earth normally takes the form of waves wandering around the planet, oscillating between the tropical and the Arctic regions. So when they swing up, these waves suck warm air from the tropics to Europe, Russia, or the US, and when they swing down, they do the same thing with cold air from the Arctic,” explains lead author Vladimir Petoukhov.

“What we found is that during several recent extreme weather events these planetary waves almost freeze in their tracks for weeks. So instead of bringing in cool air after having brought warm air in before, the heat just stays. In fact, we observe a strong amplification of the usually weak, slowly moving component of these waves,” says Petoukhov. Time is critical here: two or three days of 30 degrees Celsius are no problem, but 20 or more days lead to extreme heat stress. Since many ecosystems and cities are not adapted to this, prolonged hot periods can result in a high death toll, forest fires, and dramatic harvest losses.

Anomalous surface temperatures are disturbing the air flows

Climate change caused by greenhouse-gas emissions from fossil-fuel burning does not mean uniform global warming – in the Arctic, the relative increase of temperatures, amplified by the loss of snow and ice, is higher than on average. This in turn reduces the temperature difference between the Arctic and, for example, Europe, yet temperature differences are a main driver of air flow. Additionally, continents generally warm and cool more readily than the oceans. “These two factors are crucial for the mechanism we detected,” says Petoukhov. “They result in an unnatural pattern of the mid-latitude air flow, so that for extended periods the slow synoptic waves get trapped.”

The authors of the study developed equations that describe the wave motions in the extra-tropical atmosphere and show under what conditions those waves can grind to a halt and get amplified. They tested their assumptions using standard daily weather data from the US National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP). During recent periods in which several major weather extremes occurred, the trapping and strong amplification of particular waves – like “wave seven” (which has seven troughs and crests spanning the globe) – was indeed observed. The data show an increase in the occurrence of these specific atmospheric patterns, which is statistically significant at the 90% confidence level.

The probability of extremes increases – but other factors come in as well

“Our dynamical analysis helps to explain the increasing number of novel weather extremes. It complements previous research that already linked such phenomena to climate change, but did not yet identify a mechanism behind it,” says Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of PIK and co-author of the study. “This is quite a breakthrough, even though things are not at all simple – the suggested physical process increases the probability of weather extremes, but additional factors certainly play a role as well, including natural variability.” Also, the 32-year period studied in the project provides a good indication of the mechanism involved, yet is too short for definite conclusions.

Nevertheless, the study significantly advances the understanding of the relation between weather extremes and man-made climate change. Scientists were surprised by how far outside past experience some of the recent extremes have been. The new data show that the emergence of extraordinary weather is not just a linear response to the mean warming trend, and the proposed mechanism could explain that.

Article: Petoukhov, V., Rahmstorf, S., Petri, S., Schellnhuber, H. J. (2013): Quasi-resonant amplification of planetary waves and recent Northern Hemisphere weather extremes. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Early Edition) [doi:10.1073/pnas.1222000110]

Weblink to the article (once it is published): www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1222000110

http://www.pik-potsdam.de/news/press-releases/weather-extremes-provoked-by-trapping-of-giant-waves-in-the-atmosphere

Robin Chase: Community-shared peer organizations/corporations

I live out in the boonies of the Midwest and before that I lived in the boonies of Brazil, so I had not heard of these companies, but Robin Chase's TED talk brings out a very important point -- offer people something constructive, productive, and worthwhile to do that benefits not only themselves but their community and which is based on a structure that uses and strengthens the bonds of their community, and they will come out in droves.  Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTIibpRaZVQ

" ‘To quarterback behind the scenes, third-party efforts’: the tobacco industry and the Tea Party," by A. Fallin, R. Grana & S. A. Glantz, Tobacco Control; doi:10.1136/tobaccocontrol-2012-050815

Tobacco Control, doi:10.1136/tobaccocontrol-2012-050815                                

‘To quarterback behind the scenes, third-party efforts’: the tobacco industry and the Tea Party

Amanda Fallin,  Rachel Grana, and Stanton A Glantz*

 

Department of Medicine, University of California San Francisco, Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, San Francisco, CA, USA

 

*Correspondence to Stanton A Glantz, Department of Medicine, University of California San Francisco, Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, Room 366 Library, 530 Parnassus, San Francisco, CA 94143-1390, USA; glantz@medicine.ucsf.edu

 

Received 1 October 2012; accepted 29 January 2013; published online first 8 February 2013

Abstract

Background The Tea Party, which gained prominence in the USA in 2009, advocates limited government and low taxes. Tea Party organisations, particularly Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks, oppose smoke-free laws and tobacco taxes. 

                               

Methods We used the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, the Wayback Machine, Google, LexisNexis, the Center for Media and Democracy and the Center for Responsive Politics (opensecrets.org) to examine the tobacco companies’ connections to the Tea Party. 

                               

Results Starting in the 1980s, tobacco companies worked to create the appearance of broad opposition to tobacco control policies by attempting to create a grassroots smokers’ rights movement. Simultaneously, they funded and worked through third-party groups, such as Citizens for a Sound Economy, the predecessor of AFP and FreedomWorks, to accomplish their economic and political agenda. There has been continuity of some key players, strategies and messages from these groups to Tea Party organisations. As of 2012, the Tea Party was beginning to spread internationally.

                               

Conclusions Rather than being a purely grassroots movement that spontaneously developed in 2009, the Tea Party has developed over time, in part through decades of work by the tobacco industry and other corporate interests. It is important for tobacco control advocates in the USA and internationally, to anticipate and counter Tea Party opposition to tobacco control policies and ensure that policymakers, the media and the public understand the longstanding connection between the tobacco industry, the Tea Party and its associated organisations.

• Public Policy
• Tobacco Industry Documents
• Tobacco Industry
• Social Marketing
• Advocacy

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial License, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non commercial and is otherwise in compliance with the license. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ and http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/legalcode

http://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/early/2013/02/20/tobaccocontrol-2012-050815