Record heat following the demise of La Niña

Climate scientists in the United States say extreme weather events and warming temperatures are the new norm.

The American Meteorological Society has released its annual snapshot of the world's climate, which concludes disastrous weather events like Hurricane Sandy in the US and droughts and floods in Australia, Africa and South America will become more frequent.

The report lists a raft of indicators that show a continuously warming planet where ice sheets and glaciers will keep shrinking, and sea and land temperatures will keep rising to record levels.

2012 was a record-breaking year for the world's climate, with new extremes for sea levels, temperatures, snow coverage and ice melts.

Arctic ice levels reached record lows in 2012, and the polar region is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the planet, however on a positive note at the other end of the world, Antarctica's climate remained relatively stable and sea ice cover reached a record maximum.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-08-07/climate-report/4869646

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It’s only a few weeks until the end of summer, a terrible time to be a moose in the New Hampshire wild.

Tens of millions of winter ticks are preparing to hatch next month from eggs hidden in thick brush. They will wait there to hitch a ride on a moose and suck its blood until the end of May.

They can send a moose to its death, with up to 150,000 dining on every calf, cow and bull in certain parts of the Granite State, wildlife biologists estimate.

There was a time when eggs laid in this age-old cycle perished on winter snow. But that hasn’t happened lately in New Hampshire, where a warming trend has winters starting later and ending sooner.

A single female lays 3,000 eggs the size of salt crystals. With warmer weather, ticks don’t die, they multiply.

Winter ticks are one-host parasites that feed on a single animal through their lifetimes. As the number of ticks explodes, moose have disappeared by the thousands in areas where they were most abundant. Many of those still alive are eerily thin, with rib cages visible through ragged skin. They are mere shadows of themselves, zombies with antlers.

“It’s pretty depressing,” said Kristine Rines, a wildlife biologist and moose project leader for the state’s Fish and Game Department. “It’s a pretty tough way to go. There’s no question that climate plays a huge part in this. If we had winters that lasted as long as they used to, we might not be having this conversation.”

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/with-warmer-winters-ticks-devastating-nh-moose-population/2013/08/09/1dd3aad6-ff86-11e2-9711-3708310f6f4d_print.html

Timing a Rise in Sea Level
By JUSTIN GILLIS

Thirty-five years ago, a scientist named John H. Mercer issued a warning. By then it was already becoming clear that human emissions would warm the earth, and Dr. Mercer had begun thinking deeply about the consequences.

His paper, in the journal Nature, was titled “West Antarctic Ice Sheet and CO2 Greenhouse Effect: A Threat of Disaster.” In it, Dr. Mercer pointed out the unusual topography of the ice sheet sitting over the western part of Antarctica. Much of it is below sea level, in a sort of bowl, and he said that a climatic warming could cause the whole thing to degrade rapidly on a geologic time scale, leading to a possible rise in sea level of 16 feet.

While it is clear by now that we are in the early stages of what is likely to be a substantial rise in sea level, we still do not know if Dr. Mercer was right about a dangerous instability that could cause that rise to happen rapidly, in geologic time. We may be getting closer to figuring that out. An intriguing new paper comes from Michael J. O’Leary of Curtin University in Australia and five colleagues scattered around the world. Dr. O’Leary has spent more than a decade exploring the remote western coast of Australia, considered one of the best places in the world to study sea levels of the past.

The paper, published July 28 in Nature Geoscience, focuses on a warm period in the earth’s history that preceded the most recent ice age. In that epoch, sometimes called the Eemian, the planetary temperature was similar to levels we may see in coming decades as a result of human emissions, so it is considered a possible indicator of things to come.

Examining elevated fossil beaches and coral reefs along more than a thousand miles of coast, Dr. O’Leary’s group confirmed something we pretty much already knew. In the warmer world of the Eemian, sea level stabilized for several thousand years at about 10 to 12 feet above modern sea level.

The interesting part is what happened after that. Dr. O’Leary’s group found what they consider to be compelling evidence that near the end of the Eemian, sea level jumped by another 17 feet or so, to settle at close to 30 feet above the modern level, before beginning to fall as the ice age set in.

In an interview, Dr. O’Leary told me he was confident that the 17-foot jump happened in less than a thousand years — how much less, he cannot be sure.

This finding is something of a vindication for one member of the team, a North Carolina field geologist, Paul J. Hearty. He had argued for decades that the rock record suggested a jump of this sort, but only recently have measurement and modeling techniques reached the level of precision needed to nail the case.

We have to see if their results withstand critical scrutiny. A sea-level scientist not involved in the work, Andrea Dutton of the University of Florida, said the paper had failed to disclose enough detailed information about the field sites to allow her to judge the overall conclusion. But if the work does hold up, the implications are profound. The only possible explanation for such a large, rapid jump in sea level is the catastrophic collapse of a polar ice sheet, on either Greenland or Antarctica.

Dr. O’Leary is not prepared to say which; figuring that out is the group’s next project. But a 17-foot rise in less than a thousand years, a geologic instant, has to mean that one or both ice sheets contain some profound instability that can be set off by a warmer climate.

That, of course, augurs poorly for humans. Scientists at Stanford calculated recently that human emissions are causing the climate to change many times faster than at any point since the dinosaurs died out. We are pushing the climate system so hard that, if the ice sheets do have a threshold of some kind, we stand a good chance of exceeding it.

Another recent paper, by Anders Levermann of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and a half-dozen colleagues, implies that even if emissions were to stop tomorrow, we have probably locked in several feet of sea level rise over the long term.

Benjamin Strauss and his colleagues at Climate Central, an independent group of scientists and journalists in Princeton, that reports climate research, translated the Levermann results into graphical form, and showed the difference it could make if we launched an aggressive program to control emissions. By 2100, their calculations suggest, continuing on our current path would mean locking in a long-term sea level rise of 23 feet, but aggressive emission cuts could limit that to seven feet.    

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/13/science/timing-a-rise-in-sea-level.html?pagewanted=print   

Top oil executives are coming to London this week to try and promote a climate-friendly image of the polluting industry.

The International Petroleum Week is a mainstay of the Big Oil’s calendar and starts on Tuesday at the InterContinental Park Lane hotel in London.

The three-day annual event is set to see some of the most influential players in the oil and gas industry gather in London, including BP’s CEO Bob Dudley, executive director of the International Energy Agency (IEA) Dr Fatih Birol and representatives from Shell, Eni, Statoil, Schlumberger and Lekoil.

A US government representative is also set to attend to talk about the Trump administration’s support for the oil and gas industry.

Here is a run-down of who is coming.

The event is being hosted by the Energy Institute and its president Malcolm Brinded, the former head of Shell’s international upstream business and one of four Shell employees to be tried in a corruption case related to one of Nigeria’ biggest untapped oil fields.

Shell is an official sponsor of the event and Brinded is also registered as a speaker.

London-based bank Standard Chartered, which has recently been accused of breaching its climate pledges with plans to co-finance a dirty coal plant in Vietnam, also secured a place as a gold sponsor.

A major Tory donor and big player in the global oil and gas industry, Ian Taylor, CEO of the world’s largest oil trader Vitol, is not usually known to seek the spotlight. Yet, Taylor is due to deliver a speech at the networking dinner set to conclude the conference.

Another speaker that attracts attention is Galen Treadgold, the former vice president of the London-listed Africa oil exploration company Afren.

Afren collapsed in 2015 after its two top executives were charged in relation to a £45m fraud by the Serious Fraud Office after allegedly receiving payments from a Nigerian oil partner.

Treadgold is due to talk about “unlocking Africa’s oil and gas exploration hot spots” — a key theme at this year’s conference.

With US deputy secretary of energy Dan Brouillette a key guest speaker, organisers have given centre stage to the USenergy sector.

Brouillette, a US army veteran and lobbyist who served in the energy department during the George W Bush administration before joining Ford Motor Company,

He is due to give a keynote speech on US energy policy.

Under President Trump the US administration has been promoting the contradictory concept of “clean coal” — the dirtiest form of fossil fuel — and natural gas as an answer to climate change.

Brouillette has kept a fairly low profile on his climate change position since joining the Trump administration, yet his presence alongside a number of American energy think tanks is a symbol of the meeting's strong transatlantic ties.

One US organisation present is The Brookings Institution, a liberal non-profit public policy organisation based in Washington, DC, which received more than $1m over the last decade from prominent climate denial funders the Kochs brothers.

The conference is due to focus on how innovation and technology can drive the industry’s transition to a low-carbon economy and play up the role of gas as a “cleaner” fuel alternative.

The industry has been keen to promote gas — another fossil fuel — as a “bridge fuel” between more polluting sources of energy and renewables. But scientists have warned half of world’s gas reserves and a third of oil reserves have to stay in the ground in order to keep global temperature rise below two degrees.

Representatives from industry associations and lobby groups tasked with promoting a “green” image for the fossil fuel industry will also be present. 

This includes Rob Cox, the technical director at IPIECA, the global oil and gas industry association for environmental and social issues, which represents oil majors such as Exxon Mobil, BP, Shell and Total.

Another key speaker is Dr Pratima Rangarajan, the CEO of the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative (OGCI), a coalition of ten major oil and gas companies created to promote a climate-friendly image for some of the world’s largest polluters.

The OGCI claims it is “committed to the direction set out by the Paris Agreement on climate change” but has previously been criticised for greenwashing. Many of the companies the OGCI represents have also been involved in lobbying activities to obstruct efforts to take action on climate change.

Read more:

https://www.desmog.uk/2018/02/16/big-oil-coming-london-international-pet...

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