18 May 2017, New York Times Antarctic Dispatches: Miles of Ice Collapsing Into the Sea. The acceleration is making some scientists fear that Antarctica’s ice sheet may have entered the early stages of an unstoppable disintegration. Because the collapse of vulnerable parts of the ice sheet could raise the sea level dramatically, the continued existence of the world’s great coastal cities — Miami, New York, Shanghai and many more — is tied to Antarctica’s fate. Four New York Times journalists joined a Columbia University team in Antarctica late last year to fly across the world’s largest chunk of floating ice in an American military cargo plane loaded with the latest scientific gear. Inside the cargo hold, an engineer with a shock of white hair directed younger scientists as they threw switches. Gravity meters jumped to life. Radar pulses and laser beams fired toward the ice below. On computer screens inside the plane, in ghostly traces of data, the broad white surface of the Ross Ice Shelf began to yield the secrets hiding beneath. Read More here
Yearly Archives: 2017
18 May 2017, Climate Home, Climate talks end in call for solidarity, but real Trump test is to come. Fiji’s prime minister Frank Bainimarama, the incoming president of the next major climate meeting in November, closed talks in Bonn on Thursday with a call for solidarity. In the past fortnight, UN negotiators continued writing the rules for an agreement designed to change the global energy system. At the same time, they have been faced with the potential withdrawal of the US – the world’s largest economy – from that process. “The ball is being passed to Fiji this year at a very critical time,” said Bainimarama, whose tiny island nation will not actually host the next meeting. Instead talks will recommence in Bonn later this year, presided over by the Fijians. Despite the inevitably more inclement weather, Bainimarama promised the meeting would be infused with a Fijian spirit of “inclusiveness, friendliness and solidarity”. You can also be sure the islanders will highlight how exposed they are to the increasingly intense cyclones, rising sea levels and acidifying oceans that come with global warming. “We who are most vulnerable must be heard,” said Bainimarama, making a point to include residents of Miami and New York in a list of those in peril. “We must speak out for the whole world – every global citizen – because no-one, no matter who they are or where they live, will ultimately escape the impact of climate change.” When negotiators reconvened in Bonn last Monday, the session was predicted to be – depending on whom you asked – dull as a day with no sun or total mayhem. US president Donald Trump was fulminating in the White House over whether to withdraw from the 2015 Paris Agreement. The US team, for years a lynchpin of the negotiations, was arriving with no mandate. And yet, when the plenary hall filled up last Monday morning, with media standing at the back like vultures waiting for a battle, nothing much happened. The great cogs of a process that has run for more than two decades clunked back into gear and the whole show creaked on. In the world outside, a cascade of announcements bolstered the political, legal and economic case for the Paris accord. Trump’s imminent decision was addressed in the first call from France’s newly elected president Emmanuel Macron. He was quickly joined by China’s president Xi Jinping. India’s energy minister also reaffirmed that critical nation’s commitment to the deal. Read More here
17 May 2017, Nature, Trees in eastern US head west as climate changes. Breaking from the general poleward movement of many species, flowering trees take an unexpected turn. Ecologists have long predicted that climate change will send plants and animals uphill and towards the poles in search of familiar temperatures. Such movements have increasingly been documented around the world. But a study now shows that changing rainfall patterns may be driving some tree species in the eastern United States west, not north. Songlin Fei, a forest ecologist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, and his colleagues tracked the shifting distributions of 86 types of trees using data collected by the US Forest Service’s Forest Inventory and Analysis Program during two periods: from 1980 to 1995 and between 2013 and 2015 for all states. They found more species heading west than north, probably partly because of changing precipitation patterns, the team reported on 17 May in Science Advances1. “That was a huge surprise for us,” says Fei. This study suggests that, in the near-term, trees are responding to changes in water availability more than to temperature changes, he says. The team measured shifts in the centres of abundance for the 86 types of tree and found that over the past 30 years or so, 34% showed statistically significant poleward shifts at an average rate of 11 kilometres per decade. Forty-seven per cent made statistically significant westward shifts at an even faster rate — 15.4 kilometres per decade. Hardly any types of tree moved south or east. A new direction Most of the trees that shifted west were angiosperms, or flowering trees. Northbound trees were usually gymnosperms, which are mostly conifers in North America. Increased precipitation in the central United States could be one explanation for the angiosperms’ westward movement, says Fei. The increase in moisture is still subtle enough that only the more drought-tolerant and faster-growing flowering trees, which have more-efficient and robust vascular systems, can take advantage for now. Read More here
15 May 2017, Climate Home, Bangladesh faces food supply crunch after flash floods. The price of rice has spiked in Bangladesh after flash floods wiped out vast stretches of paddy field just ahead of harvest time. Unusually heavy pre-monsoon rainfall submerged 400,000 hectares of wetland in the northeast of the country, damaging some 2 million tonnes of rice. It is already having an impact on the market. Agricultural economist Quazi Shahabuddin, former head of the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies, told Climate Home it will cause suffering across the country this year. A kilogram of coarse rice costs 38 Bangladeshi taka ($0.57), a 58% hike since the same period in 2016, according to official data. The government is planning to procure 600,000 tonnes of rice from countries including India and Thailand, the first time in six years it has relied on international markets. The food department has put out a tender for the first 100,000-tonne tranche. “The sudden flash flood has forced us to do that,” explained Badrul Hasan, director general of the food department. The affected districts Netrokona, Sunamganj, Brahmanbaria, Moulovibazar, Hobignaj, Kishoreganj and Sylhet are located at the foothills of Indian Meghalaya and Assam states. Known as “haor” or wetland, this region is typically inundated every year in mid-May and stays underwater for six months. The problem this year was not the volume of rain, but the timing. Flash floods came at the end of March, before the farmers had harvested the “boro” crop they rely on for their annual income. Read More here