Too hot to live: grim long-term prediction

The Age, May 11, 2010

HALF the Earth could become too hot for human habitation in less than 300 years, Australian scientists warn.

New research by the University of NSW has forecast the effect of climate change over the next three centuries, a longer time scale than that considered in many similar studies.

The research suggests that without action to cut greenhouse gas emissions, average temperatures could rise as much as 10 to 12 per cent by 2300.

The research, produced in partnership with Purdue University, in the US, is published today in the American scientific journalProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

''Much of the climate change debate has been about whether the world will succeed in keeping global warming to the relatively safe level of only 2 degrees Celsius by 2100,'' said Professor Tony McMichael, from the Australian National University, in an accompanying paper published in the journal.

''But climate change will not stop in 2100 and, under realistic scenarios out to 2300, we may be faced with temperature increases of 12 degrees or even more.''

Professor McMichael said that if this were to happen, then current worries about sea level rises, occasional heatwaves and bushfires, biodiversity loss and agricultural difficulties would ''pale into insignificance'' compared to the global impacts.

Such a temperature rise would pose a ''considerable threat to the survival of our species'', he said, because ''as much as half the currently inhabited globe may simply become too hot for people to live there''.

Professor McMichael and co-author Associate Professor Keith Dear, also from ANU, described the study as ''important and necessary'' because there was a need to refocus government attention on the health impacts of global temperature rise.

There was also a real possibility that much of the existing climate modelling had underestimated the rate of global temperature rise, they said.

Dr Dear said scientific authorities on the issue, such as the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), had struck a cautious tone in forecasting future temperature rise and its impact.

''In presenting its warnings about the future, the IPCC is very careful to be conservative, using mild language and low estimates of impacts,'' Dr Dear said.

''This is appropriate for a scientific body, but world governments, including our own, should be honest with us about the full range of potential dangers posed by uncontrolled emissions and the extremes of climate change that would inevitably result.''

AAP

Open letter: Climate change and the integrity of science

Full text of an open letter from 255 members of the US National Academy of Sciences in defence of climate research

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 6 May 2010

For the full text and list of signatories go to - http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/may/06/climate-science-open-letter

See also - http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/05/07/2892671.htm

We are deeply disturbed by the recent escalation of political assaults on scientists in general and on climate scientists in particular. All citizens should understand some basic scientific facts. There is always some uncertainty associated with scientific conclusions; science never absolutely proves anything. When someone says that society should wait until scientists are absolutely certain before taking any action, it is the same as saying society should never take action. For a problem as potentially catastrophic as climate change, taking no action poses a dangerous risk for our planet.

Scientific conclusions derive from an understanding of basic laws supported by laboratory experiments, observations of nature, and mathematical and computer modelling. Like all human beings, scientists make mistakes, but the scientific process is designed to find and correct them. This process is inherently adversarial— scientists build reputations and gain recognition not only for supporting conventional wisdom, but even more so for demonstrating that the scientific consensus is wrong and that there is a better explanation. That's what Galileo, Pasteur, Darwin, and Einstein did. But when some conclusions have been thoroughly and deeply tested, questioned, and examined, they gain the status of "well-established theories" and are often spoken of as "facts."

For instance, there is compelling scientific evidence that our planet is about 4.5bn years old (the theory of the origin of Earth), that our universe was born from a single event about 14bn years ago (the Big Bang theory), and that today's organisms evolved from ones living in the past (the theory of evolution). Even as these are overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community, fame still awaits anyone who could show these theories to be wrong. Climate change now falls into this category: there is compelling, comprehensive, and consistent objective evidence that humans are changing the climate in ways that threaten our societies and the ecosystems on which we depend.

Many recent assaults on climate science and, more disturbingly, on climate scientists by climate change deniers, are typically driven by special interests or dogma, not by an honest effort to provide an alternative theory that credibly satisfies the evidence. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other scientific assessments of climate change, which involve thousands of scientists producing massive and comprehensive reports, have, quite expectedly and normally, made some mistakes. When errors are pointed out, they are corrected.

But there is nothing remotely identified in the recent events that changes the fundamental conclusions about climate change:

(i) The planet is warming due to increased concentrations of heat-trapping gases in our atmosphere. A snowy winter in Washington does not alter this fact.

(ii) Most of the increase in the concentration of these gases over the last century is due to human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.

(iii) Natural causes always play a role in changing Earth's climate, but are now being overwhelmed by human-induced changes.

(iv) Warming the planet will cause many other climatic patterns to change at speeds unprecedented in modern times, including increasing rates of sea-level rise and alterations in the hydrologic cycle. Rising concentrations of carbon dioxide are making the oceans more acidic.

(v) The combination of these complex climate changes threatens coastal communities and cities, our food and water supplies, marine and freshwater ecosystems, forests, high mountain environments, and far more.

Much more can be, and has been, said by the world's scientific societies, national academies, and individuals, but these conclusions should be enough to indicate why scientists are concerned about what future generations will face from business- as-usual practices. We urge our policymakers and the public to move forward immediately to address the causes of climate change, including the unrestrained burning of fossil fuels.

We also call for an end to McCarthy- like threats of criminal prosecution against our colleagues based on innuendo and guilt by association, the harassment of scientists by politicians seeking distractions to avoid taking action, and the outright lies being spread about them. Society has two choices: we can ignore the science and hide our heads in the sand and hope we are lucky, or we can act in the public interest to reduce the threat of global climate change quickly and substantively. The good news is that smart and effective actions are possible. But delay must not be an option.

• The signatories are all members of the US National Academy of Sciences but are not speaking on its behalf or on behalf of their institutions.

Soon to be ex-parrot extinct in the wild within five years

SEAN DOOLEY

The Age, May 5, 2010

After years of being told it was about to drop off the perch; of grabbing the headlines for supposedly stopping a range of development projects from windfarms to chemical complexes, without ever actually being responsible for halting a single project; years of being sniggered at for its somewhat Pythonesque name, the orange-bellied parrot is officially about to become extinct.

The announcement by federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett that the orange-bellied parrot will be gone from the wild in the next three to five years is due to the fact that there are fewer than 50 birds in the wild, down from an estimate of about 140 only a couple of years ago.

It will be the first species of bird to disappear in Australia in more than 70 years, yet the announcement seems to have been met with thunderous silence. Sure, we had a lot on our plates, news-wise, what with celebrity crims being murdered in prison and holiday plans disrupted by Icelandic volcanoes, but Garrett's announcement is very big news, and not just for the parrot. How in a prosperous, Western country, one that is not averse to lecturing others about their environmental stewardship, can we be witness to the demise of a high-profile species living on the doorstep of one of our biggest cities?

Never a common bird, habitat clearance and, to a lesser extent, trapping for the caged bird trade had seen the orange-bellied parrot drop to perilously low numbers. To counter this, the OBP Recovery Team was formed in 1984, the first threatened species team in Australia. Aided by various and varying government funding, and by thousands of volunteers, the team staved off extinction for the best part of two decades by monitoring birds, protecting and managing their preferred habitat both on the breeding grounds in south-west Tasmania and at key mainland wintering sites, establishing a captive breeding program as insurance, and even giving supplementary feed to breeding birds.

But something went wrong. A study by Birds Australia showed that the parrots relied on high-quality coastal saltmarsh to survive the winter. This tends to occur primarily where there is a regular inflow of fresh water - where there is fresh water coming in, the plants set more seed, providing vital food resources. With the changing climate, the past 15 years of drought has meant minimal freshwater inflows and very little seed; a situation exacerbated in the Coorong where overallocation of Murray-Darling water has seen crucially important saltmarsh completely die off. Basically, the birds have been starving on the mainland, and the journey across Bass Strait has become ever more perilous.

With the situation so dire, the recovery team has recommended drastic action be taken. While they claim they are not going to give up on the birds, the main thrust of the new approach is to capture up to 20 of the remaining wild birds to breed in captivity, in order to bolster the genetic resilience of the insurance population. Females are to be targeted, because they have better breeding success in captivity than in the wild. How the figure of 20 birds has been arrived at has not been explained. Neither has it been made clear why adult birds will be taken from the wild when usual practice would be to raise the first clutch of eggs laid, allowing the wild birds to re-lay and produce another potential future wild generation.

While this last-ditch attempt will keep the species alive, it will be effectively as a living museum piece, consigning the bird to permanent exclusion from the wild. Successfully reintroducing such a migratory species will essentially be impossible - without wild birds to guide them, how will the aviary-raised parrots possibly find the feeding grounds in their widespread natural range?

The loss of any species is surely a tragedy, not just for the sake of the creature in question, but because it is a loss of an essential part of a delicately balanced system - lose too many constituent parts and the system begins to fail. We are part of the same ecosystem as the orange-bellied parrot.

My two-year-old daughter heard me discussing all this and, being something of a parrot herself, looked up at me seriously and said, ''Orange parrot is going away,'' before adding, ''I want to see the orange parrot, daddy.'' It then hit me - by the time she is four, I won't be able to show her one in the wild. Ever. And dammit, I reckon that is something to get in a flap about.

Sean Dooley is the author of The Big Twitch and has been a volunteer with the orange-bellied parrot recovery program. He is speaking on this issue at 12.45pm tomorrow at the Wheeler Centre in the State Library of Victoria.

Melting ice makes the Arctic a vicious circle

DEBORAH SMITH

The Age, April 29, 2010

http://www.theage.com.au/environment/climate-change/melting-ice-makes-the-arctic-a-vicious-circle-20100429-tssb.html

Nature abstract available at - http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v464/n7293/pdf/nature09051.pdf

EVERYONE knows how much hotter it feels to wear a black T-shirt, rather than a white one, on a warm day.

In the same way, the melting of sea ice in the Arctic, revealing the dark water below, has been shown by Australian scientists to be the main cause of unusually rapid warming at the top of the world.

Confirmation of this "feedback loop" means the region is likely to continue to warm strongly, with greater loss of sea ice and possible melting of the ice sheets.

James Screen and Ian Simmonds, of the University of Melbourne, said the rise in surface temperatures in the Arctic in the past 20 years had been more than double the global average.

The reasons for this enhanced warming have been "hotly debated" by scientists, with factors such as changes in cloud cover, and ocean and atmospheric circulation suggested as playing a role, along with sea ice loss, Dr Screen said.

To test these ideas, the researchers looked at the latest detailed atmospheric information, modelling and satellite measurements, including warming at different heights from the surface, for the period 1989 to 2008.

"Arctic warming is strongest at the surface during most of the year and is primarily consistent with reductions in sea ice cover," said Dr Screen, whose study is published in the journal Nature.

Cloud cover did not have a big effect on recent warming, although increases in water vapour may have an impact in the lower part of the atmosphere in summer and early autumn.

Dr Screen said white ice reflects a lot of sunlight, but as it melts due to man-made warming from greenhouse gas emissions, the dark water that is exposed absorbs more heat, which in turn, melts more ice, and so on.

The amount of Arctic sea ice was at a record low in the summer of 2007, down about 40 per cent.

Although it has recovered slightly since, the long-term trend is down, he said. "We're heading towards a situation where the Arctic Sea will be ice-free in summer."

US research paper questions viability of carbon capture and storage

Document from Houston University claims governments overestimated CCS value

Terry Macalister 

guardian.co.uk, Sunday 25 April 2010

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/apr/25/research-viabilty-carbon-capture-storage

A new research paper from American academics is threatening to blow a hole in growing political support for carbon capture and storage as a weapon in the fight against global warming.

The document from Houston University claims that governments wanting to use CCS have overestimated its value and says it would take a reservoir the size of a small US state to hold the CO2 produced by one power station.

Previous modelling has hugely underestimated the space needed to store CO2 because it was based on the "totally erroneous" premise that the pressure feeding the carbon into the rock structures would be constant, argues Michael Economides, professor of chemical engineering at Houston, and his co-author Christene Ehlig-Economides, professor of energy engineering at Texas A&M University

"It is like putting a bicycle pump up against a wall. It would be hard to inject CO2 into a closed system without eventually producing so much pressure that it fractured the rock and allowed the carbon to migrate to other zones and possibly escape to the surface," Economides said.

The paper concludes that CCS "is not a practical means to provide any substantive reduction in CO2 emissions, although it has been repeatedly presented as such by others."

The report has come at a critical time when British and other governments worldwide have started to fast-track a series of CCS prototype schemes as a way of removing carbon from the atmosphere and helping with climate change.

On 8 April, Royal assent was given on to what is now the Energy Act 2010, which made law plans to raise a levy on power users to establish four CCS projects in Britain. Ministers see this as a potentially planet-friendly way of building new coal fired power stations, such as the one E.ON wants to construct at Kingsnorth, in Kent.

The Carbon Capture and Storage Association (CCSA), which lobbies on behalf of the sector, says Britain is now at the forefront of new technology with a legislative framework in place that offers the opportunity for long-term investment.

Projects are proceeding in the US, such as the experimental coal-fired Mountaineer plant in New Haven, West Virginia, which began small-scale carbon capture last year, as well as in Canada, China and other countries.

Jeff Chapman, chief executive of the CCSA, believes Economides has made inappropriate assumptions about the science and geology. He believes the conclusions in the paper are wrong and says his views are backed up by rebuttals from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Pacific Northwest National laboratory and the American Petroleum Institute.

The British Geological Survey confirmed it was looking at the Economides findings and was hoping to shortly produce a peer-reviewed analysis.

Economides, who has a PHD from Stanford University, said he had seen the arguments against his paper from the API and dismissed them as "nonsense" saying vested interests are protecting a new concept foisted on the world by geologists without proper thought.

"I was a [practising] petroleum engineer for many years and soon realised that geologists did not understand flow and the laws of physics, against which you can't argue."

Chapman pointed out that Statoil, a Norwegian oil company, had been injecting CO2 into an old reservoir on the North Sea Sleipner field for some time as a successful experiment in carbon storage. But Economides says the Sleipner scheme involved a million tonnes over three years, while one 500mW commercial station would need to absorb and store 3m tonnes annually for 25 years.Economides, who admits he veers towards being something of a climate change sceptic, says the oil and coal industries see these schemes as potential solutions so they can keep on doing what they have been doing in the past, but "CCS is the last refuge of the scoundrel," he said.

Emissions changing ocean balance

WASHINGTON

The Age, April 24, 2010http://www.theage.com.au/environment/emissions-changing-ocean-balance-20100423-tjco.htmlThe report is available for download here - http://www.nationalacademies.org/morenews/20100422.html

THE chemistry of the oceans is changing faster than it has in many thousands of years because of the carbon dioxide being absorbed from the atmosphere.

The finding comes in a report from the US National Research Council.

Carbon dioxide and other industrial gases in the air raise global temperatures in the greenhouse effect.

One factor easing that warmth has been the amount of CO2 taken up by the oceans, but that makes the water more acidic, which can affect sea life.

Since the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, the pH of ocean water has declined from 8.2 to 8.1 and a further decline of 0.2 to 0.3 units is expected by the end of this century, according to the council, an arm of the National Academy of Science.

The current rate of change ''exceeds any known change in ocean chemistry for at least 800,000 years'', the report said.

The pH level is a measure of how alkaline or acidic something is. A pH of 7 is neutral, while higher numbers are more alkaline and lower numbers more acidic.

As the ocean becomes more acidic scientists have raised concern about dissolving coral reefs and potential effects on fish and other sea life.

The US government has developed the National Ocean Acidification Program, which has called for a 10-year strategic plan and states have been asked to consider options.

AP

Scientists call for research on climate link to geological hazards

Experts say suggestions that climate change could trigger more volcanoes and earthquakes are speculative, but there is enough evidence to take the threat seriously

David Adam, environment correspondent 

guardian.co.uk, Monday 19 April 2010

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/apr/19/climate-change-geological-hazards

Scientists today called for wide-ranging research into whether more volcanoes, earthquakes, landslides and tsunamis could be triggered by rising global temperatures under global warming.

Significant warming of the atmosphere in the distant past can be linked to changes in geological activity, they say. Suggestions that climate change predicted for coming decades could bring similar changes remain speculative, but the scientists say there is enough evidence to take the threat seriously. Some experts have already linked current levels of global warming to rockfalls and landslides in mountain regions.

Richard Betts, a climate modeller at the Met Office Hadley Centre in Exeter, said: "This is a new area of academic research with potentially interesting implications. It was previously assumed there was no link at all between climate change and these events, but it is possible to speculate that climate change might make some more likely. If we do get large amounts of climate change in the long term then we might see some impacts."

He said there was no evidence that current levels of global warming were influencing events such as last week's earthquake in China that killed hundreds of people and the volcanic eruption in Iceland that grounded flights across Europe.

Experts say global warming could affect geological hazards such as earthquakes because of the way it can move large amounts of mass around on the Earth's surface. Melting glaciers and rising sea levels shift the distribution of huge amounts of water, which release and increase pressures through the ground.

These pressure changes could make ruptures and seismic shifts more likely. Research from Germany suggests that the Earth's crust can sometimes be so close to failure that tiny changes in surface pressure brought on my heavy rain can trigger quakes. Tropical storms, snowfall and shifting tides have all been linked to shifts in seismic activity.

Writing in a special series of scientific papers on the topic published today by the Royal Society, Bill McGuire, head of the Benfield Hazard Research Centre at University College London, says: "In relation to anthropogenic climate change, modelling studies and projection of current trends point towards increased risk in relation to a spectrum of geological and geomorphological hazards in a warmer world, while observations suggest that the ongoing rise in global average temperatures may already be eliciting a hazardous response from the geosphere."

He adds: "In order to improve knowledge and reduce uncertainty, a programme of focused research is advocated ... The IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] is also strongly exhorted to address more explicitly in future assessments the impact of anthropogenic climate change on the geosphere, together with its manifold potentially hazardous consequences."

The papers follow a special meeting on the subject last year and are published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A. They include studies of the likely impact of rising temperatures on events such as earthquakes and volcanoes, as well as whether the release of gas from undersea deposits called gas hydrates could trigger landslides and tsunamis.

McGuire says: "No increase in the global incidence of either volcanic activity or seismicity has been identified to date ... It may be the case that modulation of potentially hazardous geological processes due to anthropogenic climate change proves too small a signal to extract from the background noise of normal geophysical activity, at least in the short to medium term."