6 March 2016, Climate News Network, Risk level rises for North American forests. The speed at which the climate is changing is outstripping forests’ ability to adapt to drier, hotter conditions across vast swathes of the US and Canada. Drought and climate change are now threatening almost all the forests of the continental US, according to new research. Scientists from 14 laboratories and institutions warn in the journal Global Change Biology that climate is changing faster than tree populations can adapt. Existing forests, effectively and literally rooted to the spot, are experiencing conditions hotter and less reliably rainy than those in which they had evolved. “Over the last two decades, warming temperatures and variable precipitation have increased the severity of forest droughts across much of the continental United States,” says James Clark, professor of global environmental change at Duke University, North Carolina. He and colleagues synthesised hundreds of studies to arrive at a snapshot of changing conditions and a prediction of troubles ahead. Ominous predictions Other research has already delivered ominous predictions for the forests of the US southwest, but the scientists warn that other, normally leafier parts of the continent face increasing stress. Dieback, bark beetle infestation and wildfire risk may no longer be confined to the western uplands. “While eastern forests have not experienced the types of changes seen in western forests in recent decades, they too are vulnerable to drought and could experience significant changes with increased severity, frequency, or duration in drought,” the authors say. Professor Clark puts it more bluntly: “Our analysis shows virtually all US forests are now experiencing change and are vulnerable to future declines. Given the uncertainty in our understanding of how forest species and stands adapt to rapid change, it’s going to be difficult to anticipate the type of forests that will be here in 20 to 40 years.” Read More here
Yearly Archives: 2016
4 March 2016, Energy Post, BP says not to worry, good times will return. Aside from minor adjustments, BP’s latest Energy Outlook is mostly business-as-usual, writes Fereidoon Sionshansi, president of Menlo Energy Economics and publisher of the newsletter EEnergy Informer.BP seems to have missed out entirely on the agreement reached in Paris in December 2015, as if it did not happen, notes Sionshansi: “The Outlook seems more of a wish list than a forecast.” BP‘s annual Energy Outlook is always worth a read even if you do not agree with BP’s oil-centric outlook. The 2016 edition, which looks out to 2030, is no exception. To its credit, BP is slowly and grudgingly acknowledging that the future may evolve rather differently than the past – e.g., lower global demand growth rates, changes in the mix of fuels that supply the demand, growth of renewables especially in the power generation sector – yet it seems reluctant or unable to abandon the status quo, the history with which it is familiar and comfortable. Call it organizational inertia, or bias, common among all oil majors. Few would fundamentally disagree that at $30 a barrel, oil is too cheap – certainly compared to highs of 100+ in 2014. But given the supply glut and fierce competition among many producers it is less clear how soon the rebalancing will take place, to what extent prices will rebound and for how long. US shale producers, for example, are likely to be back in business once prices rise above $50, dampening the price recovery. Read More here
3 March 2016, Energy Post, Exxon’s never-ending big dig. ExxonMobil not only appears to have ignored its own scientists when they warned about the dangers of greenhouse gas emissions in the 1980s, the company even took advantage of its inside knowledge by leasing large tracts for Arctic oil exploration, writes famous author and activist Bill McKibben in a revealing essay. What is worse, says McKibben, is that even today Exxon continues to spend billions finding and producing ever more fossil fuels. But he notes that “revulsion is growing”: Big Oil may yet suffer the same fate as Big Tobacco. Courtesy of TomDispatch.com. Here’s the story so far. We have the chief legal representatives of the eighth and 16th largest economies on Earth (California and New York) probing the biggest fossil fuel company on Earth (ExxonMobil), while both Democratic presidential candidates are demanding that the federal Department of Justice join the investigation of what may prove to be one of the biggest corporate scandals in American history. And that’s just the beginning. As bad as Exxon has been in the past, what it’s doing now – entirely legally – is helping push the planet over the edge and into the biggest crisis in the entire span of the human story. “We will adapt to this … It’s an engineering problem, and it has engineering solutions” Back in the fall, you might have heard something about how Exxon had covered up what it knew early on about climate change. Maybe you even thought to yourself: that doesn’t surprise me. But it should have. Even as someone who has spent his life engaged in the bottomless pit of greed that is global warming, the news and its meaning came as a shock: we could have avoided, it turns out, the last quarter century of pointless climate debate. Read More here
3 March 2016, Science Daily, Greenland’s ice is getting darker, increasing risk of melting. Feedback loops from melting itself are driving changes in reflectivity. Greenland’s snowy surface has been getting darker over the past two decades, absorbing more heat from the sun and increasing snow melt, a new study of satellite data shows. That trend is likely to continue, with the surface’s reflectivity, or albedo, decreasing by as much as 10 percent by the end of the century, the study says. While soot blowing in from wildfires contributes to the problem, it hasn’t been driving the change, the study finds. The real culprits are two feedback loops created by the melting itself. One of those processes isn’t visible to the human eye, but it is having a profound effect. The results, published in the European Geosciences Union journal The Cryosphere, have global implications. Fresh meltwater pouring into the ocean from Greenland raises sea level and could affect ocean ecology and circulation. “You don’t necessarily have to have a ‘dirtier’ snowpack to make it dark,” said lead author Marco Tedesco, a research professor at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and adjunct scientist at NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies. “A snowpack that might look ‘clean’ to our eyes can be more effective in absorbing solar radiation than a dirty one. Overall, what matters, it is the total amount of solar energy that the surface absorbs. This is the real driver of melting.” The feedback loops work like this: During a warm summer with clear skies and lots of solar radiation pouring in, the surface starts to melt. As the top layers of fresh snow disappear, old impurities, like dust from erosion or soot that blew in years before, begin to appear, darkening the surface. A warm summer can remove enough snow to allow several years of impurities to concentrate at the surface as surrounding snow layers disappear. At the same time, as the snow melts and refreezes, the grains of snow get larger. This is because the meltwater acts like glue, sticking grains together when the surface refreezes. The larger grains create a less reflective surface that allows more solar radiation to be absorbed. The impact of grain size on albedo — the ratio between reflected and incoming solar radiation — is strong in the infrared range, where humans can’t see, but satellite instruments can detect the change. Read More here