24 August 2016,Climate Home, Adaptation takes centre stage as IPCC prepares 1.5C study. Tackling climate change is no longer simply about cutting greenhouse gas emissions: flood defences, heat resilient crops and weather warning systems are set to take centre stage. That’s the message from scientists fresh from an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) meeting in Geneva last week. The UN science body has started work on a new and potentially devastating report on ways to avoid warming the earth to more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels – and the consequences of failure. Due in September 2018, it will set the political tenor for global talks on climate change through to 2020, by which time the new Paris Agreement on climate change is slated to become operational. Critically, it will underpin a UN-led review the same year into how countries are delivering on the Paris deal, and perhaps offer the basis for those national goals to be increased. …… The trouble is it’s effectively too late for that, said Chris Field, co-chair of the IPCC’s last major study and a colleague of Mach’s at the Carnegie Institution and Stanford University. Read More here
Category Archives: Impacts Observed & Projected
22 August 2016, Washington Post, A widening 80 mile crack is threatening one of Antarctica’s biggest ice shelves. For some time, scientists who focus on Antarctica have been watching the progression of a large crack in one of the world’s great ice shelves — Larsen C, the most northern major ice shelf of the Antarctic peninsula and the fourth largest Antarctic ice shelf overall. Larsen C, according to the British Antarctic Survey, is “slightly smaller than Scotland.” It’s called an ice “shelf” because the entirety of this country-sized area is covered by 350-meter-thick ice that is floating on top of deep ocean waters. The crack in Larsen C grew around 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) in length between 2011 and 2015. And as it grew, also became wider — by 2015, yawning some 200 meters in length. Since then, growth has only continued — and now, a team of researchers monitoring Larsen C say that with the intense winter polar night over Antarctica coming to an end, they’ve been able to catch of glimpse of what happened to the crack during the time when it could not be observed by satellite. The result was astonishing. The rift had grown another 22 kilometers (13.67 miles) since it was last observed in March 2016, and has widened to about 350 meters, report researchers from Project MIDAS, a British Antarctic Survey funded collaboration of researchers from Swansea and Aberystwyth Universities in Wales and other institutions. The full length of the rift is now 130 km, or over 80 miles. Read More here
22 August 2016, The Conversation, New modelling on bushfires shows how they really burn through an area. Bushfires in Australia can have a devastating impact on an environment and destroy homes and lives, so any effort to prevent them is a welcome move. But the way that we have traditionally understood bushfires and forest flammability in Australia is not up to the challenges of our changing climate. Thankfully, a new approach is making sense of the confusion by looking at the plants themselves. Unfortunately though, time is running out. Years ago I could stand on a ridge in the mountains as winter gales roared through the Alpine Ash forests on the slopes below me. There’d be black cockatoos on the wind and the first hard snow flakes rattling on my coat. It was a wildness that stung the eyes with raw beauty. Sadly those forests are dying. They are being burnt so often that they may be gone by the end of the century. Like the tallest hardwoods in the world and the thousand year old King Billy pines of Tasmania, they are places we have no room for in our fossil fuel economy. It’s not that fire is bad; our forests need it. But it’s coming so hard and fast in this changing climate. We fight the fires and we manage the fuels as best we can, but our best efforts are only as good as the science they are built on, and there are some hard questions to be asked about that science. Read More here
19 August 2016, Washington Post, ‘Climate change is water change’ — why the Colorado River system is headed for major trouble. There’s good news and bad news for the drought-stricken Colorado River system, according to projections just released in a new federal report from the Bureau of Reclamation, manager of dams, power plants and canals. The report predicts that Lake Mead — the river system’s largest reservoir, supplying water to millions of people in Nevada, Arizona, California and Mexico — will narrowly escape a shortage declaration next year. But a shortage is looking imminent in 2018, and water experts are growing ever more worried about the river system’s future. The Colorado River basin has been plagued with drought for 15 years now, and the effects are starting to show. Earlier this spring, Lake Mead — which feeds 90 percent of the water supply in Las Vegas, alone — dropped to its lowest levels since the Hoover Dam was completed in 1936. In fact, the last time the lake was at full capacity, with water levels 1,225 feet above sea level, was in 1983. Since then, and particularly since the year 2000, its surface levels have been steadily dropping, leaving behind a striking white “bathtub ring” around the shoreline showing how the water levels have decreased over the years. Currently, demand on Lake Mead has been removing more water than is being replenished, resulting in a deficit of about 1.2 million acre-feet, or about 400 billion gallons, each year. According to federal guidelines, a shortage is to be declared at the start of any given year if Lake Mead’s water levels have sunk below 1,075 feet above sea level. The new federal projections, spanning the next 24 months, suggest that the elevation will be hovering just below 1,079 feet at the end of this December. Read More here