The Closing Window of Opportunity on Realizing Global Warming can Serviceably Be Unrealized. I like thisUnlikeLike0 “In my opinion, the rate of ocean heat storage is the most fundamental number for our understanding of long-term climate change,” James Hansen.
Climate change is heat trapped by greenhouse gases that produce an energy imbalance between the energy flowing in and out of the upper atmosphere. As shown in the following skepticalscience.com visual for global warming components for the period 1993 to 2003 calculated from IPCC AR4 5.2.2.3, only slightly more than 2% of this heat actually remains in the atmosphere. By far the majority is going into the ocean and according to the latest study, two-thirds of that is accumulating in the upper 700 meters, with another 15 percent below 2,000 meters, and 20 percent in between.
Further the rate of accumulation of this heat the past 18 years matched that of the previous 133 years. Because of their great mass and heat capacity the ocean’s have thermal inertia. The oceans are a global warming buffer. Energy and Climate News. RTCC - Climate change news, comments and analysis.
Oceanic. Getting rich off global warming. On the opening morning of the inaugural National Adaptation Forum, I was eating breakfast at a stand-up table in the exhibition hall when a mustachioed man of middle age plopped his cherry Danish next to my pile of conference literature, a mess of pamphlets and reports with titles like Getting Climate Smart: A Water Preparedness Guide for State Action, and Successful Adaptation: Linking Science and Policy in a Rapidly Changing World.
The nametag dangling above the Danish identified the man as Michael Hughes, director of public works for the Chicago suburb of Elmhurst. Like many attendees, Hughes was part of a new national emergency-response team without being fully aware of it. He had arrived in Denver knowing little about “adaptation,” the anemic catchall for attempts to fortify our natural and built environments against the epochal temperature spike in progress. “I hadn’t even heard the term ‘adaptation’ a month ago,” he told me, taking a bite. And yeah, it’s pronounced, “Noah.” Carbon Negative Strategies Emerging as Global Warming Solution. Scientists at the Stanford University Global Climate and Energy Project have proposed taking the global warming fight to a whole new level.
The problem is that we’re so far behind in greenhouse gas emissions management, that it’s time to get more aggressive. Rather than simply trying to reduce the carbon we put into the atmosphere, the Stanford team proposes a carbon negative strategy in which plants are deployed on a massive scale to grab carbon out of the atmosphere. Great idea, but there’s a way to make it even better. A Biomass, Carbon Negative Strategy As described yesterday in our sister site PlanetSave, the Stanford team has identified the biomass as one of the most promising ways to achieve carbon negative systems, on a large scale. These biomass-based systems are called bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). The basic idea is to break the carbon cycle. However, there’s a catch. In other words, industrial carbon capture has to be part of the solution, too.
Big Carbon. Home Page. Climate Etc. Climate Central. RealClimate.