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
Tag Archives: Arctic
9 January 2016, Climate News Network, Ice melt speeds up sea level rise. Scientists have found evidence suggesting that melting icecap water from the interior of Greenland is adding to sea level rise faster than previously realised. Water may be flowing from the Greenland icecapand into the sea more quickly than anybody expected. It doesn’t mean that global warming has got conspicuously worse: rather, researchers have had to revise their understanding of the intricate physiology of the northern hemisphere’s biggest icecap. There is enough ice and snow packed deep over 1.7 million square kilometres of Greenland that, were it all to melt, would cause a rise in global sea levels of about six metres. Climate calculations Since the icecap is melting as the atmospheric levels of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide rise, and global temperatures rise with them, as a consequence of the human combustion of fossil fuels, the rate at which summer meltwater gets into the oceans becomes vital to climate calculations. The latest rethink begins not with the pools of water that collect on the surface each summer, or the acceleration of the glaciers as they make their way to the ocean, but with a granular layer of snow just below the surface, called firn. This is old snow in the process of being compacted into glacier ice, and covers the island in a layer up to 80 metres thick. Until now, researchers have understood this firn layer as a kind of sponge that absorbs meltwater and holds it, thus limiting the flow of melting ice into the sea. Read More here
20 December 2015, Climate News Network, Rapid warming brings Arctic changes. Tundra plants that bloom fresh and green in the short Arctic summer are declining or turning brown as rising temperatures increasingly affect the region. Scientists in the US who have been checking on the health of the Arctic over the last year are worried by what they’ve learned: it’s warmer, has less ice, and some of its animals and fish are facing new stresses. And in a surprise finding , which they cannot yet explain, the scientists discovered that green vegetation over much of the Arctic began a few years ago to turn an uncharacteristic brown. Plenty of what they detail in the Arctic Report Card − published annually to document the sometimes rapidly changing conditions in the region − comes as no great surprise. The latest Report Card, sponsored by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), shows the air temperature continuing its warming trend. In 2015, it was well above average across the Arctic, with temperature anomalies over land more than -0.16°C above average − the highest since records began in 1900. The report reveals increases not only in air but also in sea surface temperatures, decreasing sea ice extent and Greenland ice sheet mass, and changes to the behaviour of fish and walruses. Read More here
15 December 2015, YALE Climate Connections, More Glum News on Arctic Warming. Arctic’s trailing climate indicators are seen as the leading indicators for climate elsewhere on Earth. News from the Arctic hasn’t gotten any better in the 10 years since NOAA began producing an annual Arctic Report Card, and this year’s collection of results and essays is no exception. NOAA released its latest report December 15 at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. “The Arctic is warming twice as fast as other parts of the planet,” said Rick Spinrad, NOAA chief scientist, adding “what happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic.” The average Arctic temperature change, 2.3 degrees F (1.3 degrees C) above average, continues to outpace change in the rest of the world, a phenomenon known as “Arctic amplification.” Since the beginning of the 20th century, Arctic warming is now a hefty 5.4 degrees F (3.0 degrees C), leading to significant changes to the region. “One could argue that the trailing indicators in the Arctic are the leading indicators for the rest of the climate,” Spinrad said. Two items from the report, which was written by 72 authors from 11 different countries, were highlighted here: a mysterious browning of Arctic tundra, and the impact of change on walruses. “Greenness” – a measure of photosynthetic activity by satellites — has been declining since 2001 (see Figure below), with a sharp drop-off in the past two to four years, running counter to the notion that more carbon dioxide is unequivocally good for plant life. “We don’t have an answer yet” to the declining greenness, said Howard Epstein, a scientist from the University of Virginia. “A drop in greenness for any given year isn’t alarming, or even two years in a row.” But four years makes for a noticeable trend. Read more here