Agency plea over climate warning. 25 April 2012Last updated at 14:18 ET By Roger Harrabin Environment analyst Carbon capture is described as "woefully off pace" in the report Leading energy ministers have been told the world is on track for a long-term temperature increase of 6C unless they change their priorities. The International Energy Agency (IEA) said on current trends, emissions would double from 2009 to 2050. The deputy director of the IEA, Richard Jones, urged ministers: "Please take our warning seriously. " He was speaking at the Clean Energy Ministerial, a forum for 23 major nations.
Mr Jones said the world could still possibly hold CO2 under 32Gt - the level equated with a 2C temperature rise - but only if nations co-operated urgently on clean technology. The report Tracking Clean Energy Progress, says: "The current trend of increasing emissions is unbroken with no stabilisation of GHG [greenhouse gas] concentrations in sight. " Mr Jones presented a traffic light scorecard. Sex appeal 'False economy' Weather 'cost rural Britain £1bn' 9 September 2012Last updated at 18:06 ET By Tom Heap BBC Countryfile The ice cream business has been hit hard This year's dreadful weather has cost rural Britain at least £1bn, according to an investigation by BBC One's Countryfile. Data from farmers, tourist businesses, insurers and events organisers show the wettest summer for 100 years has hit the countryside hard.
Factors include reduced visitor numbers at countryside attractions such as stately homes and camp sites. Meanwhile, some country events were cancelled due to bad weather. Gary Rogers runs Yorkshire Dales Ice Cream but his fleet of vans have spent too much time in the yard. His on-farm dairy has tubs stacking up in the freezer. "It's been a catastrophic year, worse than anybody's known," he said. His personal experience is backed up by wider research. A look at some of the flooding that hit the country (first broadcast July 2012) Rotting crops Gary's wife, Mandy Rogers, runs a beef herd alongside the dairy.
UK carbon measuring centre 'to improve climate future' 25 March 2012Last updated at 20:05 ET By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News The centre will make use of the NPL's existing "Hot Box" for testing building components A new UK facility aimed at improving measurement of carbon emissions and boosting development of clean technology is due to open. The Centre for Carbon Measurement will be based at the National Physical Laboratory in south-west London. It will raise accuracy of climate data, support better emissions monitoring to ensure a fair carbon market, and verify claims made about low-carbon products. It will be formally launched at the Planet Under Pressure event in London. The four-day conference will see thousands of delegates discuss various aspects of social and environmental sustainability in the run-up to the Rio+20 summit in June. "So the better data we have, the better we can make the models," she told BBC News.
Continue reading the main story “Start Quote End QuoteDavid WilletsScience Minister Hi-tech low carbon. New project to help predict the future of the UK’s coastline :: University of Southampton. New project to help predict the future of the UK’s coastline Ref: 12/49 23 March 2012 Coastal erosion at Southwold A new project is being launched that will help forecast what the UK’s coastline will look like in the future, up to 100 years’ time. The four-year £2.9m iCoast project is bringing together a number of UK universities, research laboratories and leading consultants, to develop new methods that will characterise and forecast long-term changes to coastal sediment systems. UK coastal areas are at greater risk of flooding and erosion than their landward equivalents and degradation of their geomorphic systems, due to sediment starvation and/or climate change, could greatly increase these risks.
Previously, the ability to analyse and forecast geomorphic changes was limited. These models will be achieved through four work streams: UN scientists warn of increased groundwater demands due to climate change. Climate change has been studied extensively, but a new body of research guided by a San Francisco State University hydrologist looks beneath the surface of the phenomenon and finds that climate change will put particular strain on one of our most important natural resources: groundwater. SF State Assistant Professor of Geosciences Jason Gurdak says that as precipitation becomes less frequent due to climate change, lake and reservoir levels will drop and people will increasingly turn to groundwater for agricultural, industrial, and drinking water needs. The resource accounts for nearly half of all drinking water worldwide, but recharges at a much slower rate than aboveground water sources and in many cases is nonrenewable. The scientists recently released a book of their research, titled "Climate Change Effects on Groundwater Resources," that is the result of a global groundwater initiative by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
Climate change: threats and opportunities to the UK - graphic | Environment. Record Arctic Sea Ice Melt to Levels Unseen in Millennia. Posted on 5 September 2012 by dana1981 The record Arctic sea ice decline this year has predictably and deservedly received a fair amonut of media attention. Jonathan Leake of the Sunday Times recently penned an article on the impending sea ice record.
The bulk of the article was quite good, but at the end succumbed to the standard mainstream media practice of seeking "balance," thus including some comments by John Christy. Christy has become very reliable for arguing that anything and everything related to climate change probably just boils down to natural variability, as he recently told US Congress was the case with regards to the frequency of extreme weather events, contrary to the body of peer-reviewed scientific literature.
As we will see in this post, Christy once again misrepresented the body of scientific literature with regards to Arctic sea ice extent in his efforts to paint the Arctic sea ice death spiral as nothing out of the ordinary. 2012 vs. 1940. Climate 'tech fixes' urged for Arctic methane. Update for world temperature data. 19 March 2012Last updated at 12:37 ET By Mark Kinver Environment reporter, BBC News The Arctic is warming faster than any other region on the planet, data shows Researchers have updated HadCRUT - one of the main global temperate records, which dates back to 1850.
One of the main changes is the inclusion of more data from the Arctic region, which has experienced one of the greatest levels of warming. The amendments do not change the long-term trend, but the data now lists 2010, rather than 1998, as the warmest year on record. The update is reported in the published in the Journal of Geophysical Research. HadCRUT is compiled by the UK Met Office's Hadley Centre and the Climatic Research Unit (Cru) at the University of East Anglia, and is one of three global records used extensively by climatologists.
The other two are produced by US-based researchers at Nasa and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa). Despite the revisions, the overall warming signal has not changed. Disappearing Arctic Sea Ice & More Powerful Storms? Feb 27, 2012 9:35pm New research suggests disappearing sea ice at the top of the planet is playing a “critical” role in driving colder, snowier winters here in the United States. Retreating Arctic sea ice, according to the researchers, helps alter the atmosphere in two ways. First, scientists found that less ice is causing a change in atmospheric circulation patterns, weakening the westerly winds that blow across the northern Pacific and Atlantic oceans. That weakened jet stream, in turn, allows more frequent surges of bitter cold Arctic air not only into the U.S., but also in Europe and east Asia.
“We have more cold air outbreaks,” said Jiping Liu, a senior research scientist in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, and a co-author of the new study released today. The second factor, Liu said, is that more water is evaporating into the air as Arctic ice at the ocean’s surface melts away. “Is Arctic ice in a death spiral? Planet may be near tipping point, study warns. STANFORD (US) — The planet may be nearing a critical threshold, beyond which environmental changes will be rapid and unpredictable, according to a new study.
Most current predictions of environmental change are based on extrapolations from current trends. But what if that isn’t an accurate picture of the future? What if we are approaching a critical threshold—one that, once crossed, would lead to accelerated, widespread and largely unpredictable environmental degradations? This is the alarming conclusion of a paper co-authored by Stanford University biology professor Elizabeth Hadly that appears in the new issue of Nature—an issue devoted to the environment, in anticipation of the United Nations’ June 20-22 Conference on Sustainable Development. The consensus statement by 22 respected scientists uses past examples to suggest that Earth’s current systems will experience a major disruption—perhaps within a few generations. “The environment will enter a new state,” says Hadly. Tipping point. Climate change may stir geological mayhem. Fred Pearce, consultant In Waking the Giant: How a changing climate triggers earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanoes, geologist Bill McGuire warns we may be waking primordial monsters IN 2006, London geologist Bill McGuire argued in New Scientist that global warming would trigger epidemics of volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and tsunamis.
Now he's written the book. The story is even scarier writ large. The world as McGuire sees it in Waking the Giant sometimes seems more ancient myth than modern science. There is now abundant evidence that catastrophic outbursts of geological activity accompanied past periods of rapid climate change, for instance, when we shifted in and out of ice ages. During the last ice age, the weight of ice suppressed volcanic eruptions. McGuire explains that volcanoes "are primed systems constantly teetering on the edge of stability and highly sensitive to minuscule changes to their external environment".
It could be that something is afoot. Temperatures could rise by 3C by 2050, models suggest. 25 March 2012Last updated at 13:41 ET Climate temperature predictions can influence planning, such as for sea defences Global temperatures could rise by 1.4-3.0C (2.5-5.4F) above levels for late last century by 2050, a computer simulation has suggested. Almost 10,000 climate simulations were run on volunteers' home computers. The projections, published in Nature Geoscience, are somewhat higher than those from other models. The researchers aimed to explore a wider range of possible futures, which they say helps "get a handle" on the uncertainties of the climate system. People planning for the impacts of climate change need to consider the possibility of warming of up to 3C by 2050, even on a mid-range emission scenario, the researchers say.
The study - run through climateprediction.net with the BBC Climate Change Experiment - ran simulations using a complex atmosphere-ocean climate model. 'Innovative' ensemble Continue reading the main story Adaptation. World Climate Report » “Methane Time Bomb in Arctic Seas – Apocalypse Not” Our headline is taken from New York Times blogger Andy Revkin’s recent DotEarth post covering the results of a new paper which investigates the relationship between higher temperatures in recent decades and methane release from the Arctic seabed off the Siberian coast.
As you can probably tell from the headline, the research team, led by Igor Dmitrenko, did not find that global warming, current and future, was going to have much of a dramatic impact on the release of methane from the Arctic seas. This is a fairly significant finding because methane—which has about 20 times the impact on the greenhouse effect that carbon dioxide does on a molecule by molecule basis—has the potential to act as a large amplifier (positive feedback) to a warming climate.
Consequently the specter of a large Arctic methane release plays a prominent role in many of the more alarming future climate change storylines. Figure 1 shows the latest methane data. Figure 1. And Revkin ends with a bit of sage advice: Amount of coldest Antarctic water near ocean floor decreasing for decades. March 20, 2012 A layer of Antarctic Bottom Water colder than 0ºC (colors, with darkest blue areas having the thickest layer, and white none) covers the ocean floor around Antarctica (center, shaded grey). Rates at which this layer is thinning during the study period (red numbers in meters per decade) are shown for for each deep basin (outlined by thin grey lines). These rates are estimated using data from repeated oceanographic expeditions (ship tracks shown by thick black lines). Note that seawater at the ocean surface stays liquid even at temperatures approaching -2ºC because of its high salt content. Download here (Credit: NOAA) Scientists have found a large reduction in the amount of the coldest deep ocean water, called Antarctic Bottom Water, all around the Southern Ocean using data collected from 1980 to 2011.
Antarctic Bottom Water is formed in a few distinct locations around Antarctica, where seawater is cooled by the overlying air and made saltier by ice formation.