11 August 2015, The Conversation, Odds keep rising for a big El Niño in 2015. El Niño has arrived, it’s getting stronger, and it’s not about to go away soon. And already there are rumblings that this could be a big one. El Niño in Australia means warmer temperatures, and sometimes, but not always, drier conditions. In 2014, some climatologists thought a big El Niño might have been on the cards. Ultimately, after some vigorous early warming in the Pacific, conditions only touched on El Niño thresholds. This year, with an event already established, climatologists are suggesting the odds are rising of an El Niño rivalling the record events of 1982 and 1997. So what’s all the fuss about, and how are conditions different from last year? Read More here
Category Archives: Impacts Observed & Projected
10 August 2015, Washington Post, A stunning five million acres have now burned in Alaskan wildfires this year. Last month, wildfire watchers were astounded as terrifying wildfires raged across the state of Alaska. Sometimes the records would come in with 300,000 or more new acres burned in a single day. It seemed inevitable that the 2015 wildfire season would quickly catch up with and then surpass the all-time record year, 2004, when 6,590,140 acres burned. But then the weather shifted. Rains moved in, and satellite analysts downsized their size estimates of some fires. Instead of racing forward, the fire acreage numbers slowed or even stopped their increase. Only recently have they started to tick back up again. Nonetheless, according to the latest report Tuesday from the Alaska Interagency Coordination Center, Alaska fires have now consumed 5,098,829.9 acres in 2015. That’s about five-sixths of the total acreage consumed by wildfires anywhere in America this year —currently, 6,224,545 acres. It’s also enough to put the 2015 Alaska wildfire season ahead of what was previously the second-place year — 1957, with 5,049,661 acres burned, according to the Alaska Division of Forestry. [Alaska’s terrifying wildfire season and what it says about climate change] So will 2015 overtake 2004 and set a new record for the most acres burned? A seasonal wildfire outlook from the National Interagency Fire Center shows a big red splotch across Alaska for the month of August — a forecast of areas where conditions would be favorable for increased wildfire activity. “The volume of active fires on the landscape should continue to produce acreage gains through August,” the agency notes. As of Tuesday, 238 fires were still burning across the state. Read More here
3 August 2015, Potsdam Institute, CO2 removal cannot save the oceans – if we pursue business as usual. Greenhouse-gas emissions from human activities do not only cause rapid warming of the seas, but also ocean acidification at an unprecedented rate. Artificial carbon dioxide removal (CDR) from the atmosphere has been proposed to reduce both risks to marine life. A new study based on computer calculations now shows that this strategy would not work if applied too late. CDR cannot compensate for soaring business-as-usual emissions throughout the century and beyond, even if the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration would be restored to pre-industrial levels at some point in the future. This is due to the tremendous inertia of the ocean system. Thus, CDR cannot substitute timely emissions reductions, yet may play a role as a supporting actor in the climate drama. Ocean acidification affects the shells of plankton like Pteropods. “Geoengineering measures are currently being debated as a kind of last resort to avoid dangerous climate change – either in the case that policymakers find no agreement to cut CO2 emissions, or to delay the transformation of our energy systems,” says lead-author Sabine Mathesius from GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). “However, looking at the oceans we see that this approach carries great risks.” In scenarios of timely emissions reductions, artificially removing CO2can complement efforts. “Yet in a business-as-usual scenario of unabated emissions, even if the CO2 in the atmosphere would later on be reduced to the preindustrial concentration, the acidity in the oceans could still be more than four times higher than the preindustrial level,” says Mathesius. “It would take many centuries to get back into balance with the atmosphere.” Read More here
3 August 2015, Science Daily, Glaciers melting faster than ever. The World Glacier Monitoring Service has compiled worldwide data on glacier changes for more than 120 years. Together with its National Correspondents in more than 30 countries, the international service just published a new comprehensive analysis of global glacier changes. In this study, observations of the first decade of the 21st century (2001-2010) were compared to all available earlier data from in-situ, air-borne, and satellite-borne observations as well as to reconstructions from pictorial and written sources. “The observed glaciers currently lose between half a metre and one metre of its ice thickness every year — this is two to three times more than the corresponding average of the 20th century,” explains Michael Zemp, Director of the World Glacier Monitoring Service and lead author of the study. “Exact measurements of this ice loss are reported from a few hundred glaciers only. However, these results are qualitatively confirmed from field and satellite-based observations for tens of thousands of glaciers around the world.” Global glacier decline According to the international author team, the current rate of glacier melt is without precedence at global scale, at least for the time period observed and probably also for recorded history, as indicated also in reconstructions from written and illustrated documents. In addition, the study shows that the long-term retreat of glacier tongues is a global phenomenon. Read More here