Climate change can cause both flooding and drought

Climate change can cause both flooding and droughts. How is that possible? Learn more: bit.ly/2kY6xh6

New study questions long-held theories of climate variability in the North Atlantic

A University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric-led study challenges the prevailing wisdom by identifying the atmosphere as the driver of a decades-long climate variation known as the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO).

The findings offer new insight on the causes and predictability of natural climate variations, which are known to cause wide-ranging global weather impacts, including increased rainfall, drought, and greater hurricane frequency in many parts of the Atlantic basin.

For decades, research on climate variations in the Atlantic has focused almost exclusively on the role of ocean circulation as the main driver, specifically the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, which carries warm water north in the upper layers of the ocean and cold water south in lower layers like a large conveyor belt.

“The idea of the ocean as the driver has been a powerful one.” said UM Rosenstiel School Professor Amy Clement, the lead author on the study. We used computer models in a new way to test this idea, and find that in fact there is a lot that can be explained without the ocean circulation.”

While the overall rise in average temperature of the Atlantic is caused by greenhouse gases, this study examines the fluctuations occurring within this human-related trend. Identifying the main driver of the AMO is critical to help predict the overall warming of the North Atlantic Ocean in coming decades from both natural and human-made climate change. Recent research suggests that an AMO warm phase has been in effect since the mid-1990s, which has caused changes in rainfall in the southeastern US, and resulted in twice as many tropical storms becoming hurricanes than during cool phases.

Using multiple climate models from around the world, Clement’s research team removed the ocean circulation from the analysis to reveal that variations in the Atlantic climate were generally the same. The AMO results in a horseshoe-shaped pattern of ocean surface temperatures in the North Atlantic Ocean that have been naturally occurring for the last 1000 years on timescales of 60-80 years. This new analysis shows that the pattern of the AMO can be accounted for by atmospheric circulation alone, without any role for the ocean circulation.

“These results force us to rethink our ability to predict decade-scale temperature fluctuations in the Atlantic and their associated impacts on land. It may be that many of the changes have limited predictability, which means that we should be prepared for a range of climate outcomes associated with global warming,” said Clement. More

The work was support by grants from the Department of Energy and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.

Story Source:

The above post is reprinted from materials provided by University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Journal Reference:

1. A. Clement, K. Bellomo, L. N. Murphy, M. A. Cane, T. Mauritsen, G. Radel, B. Stevens. The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation without a role for ocean circulation. Science, 2015; 350 (6258): 320 DOI: 10.1126/science.aab3980

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Our Perpetual Ocean

This is an animation of ocean surface currents from June 2005 to December 2007 from NASA satellites. Watch how bigger currents like the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic Ocean and the Kuroshio in the Pacific carry warm waters across thousands of miles at speeds greater than four miles per hour (six kilometers per hour); how coastal currents like the Agulhas in the Southern Hemisphere move equatorial waters toward Earth's poles; and how thousands of other ocean currents are confined to particular regions and form slow-moving, circular pools called eddies. Credit: NASA/SVS
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The swirling flows of tens of thousands of ocean currents were captured in this scientific visualization created by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

"There is also a 20-minute long tour, which shows these global surface currents in more detail," says Horace Mitchell, the lead of the visualization studio. "We also released a three-minute version on our NASA Visualization Explorer iPad app."

Both the 20-minute and 3-minute versions are available in high definition here: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/goto?3827

The visualization covers the period June 2005 to December 2007 and is based on a synthesis of a numerical model with observational data, created by a NASA project called Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean, or ECCO for short. ECCO is a joint project between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. ECCO uses advanced mathematical tools to combine observations with the MIT numerical ocean model to obtain realistic descriptions of how ocean circulation evolves over time.

These model-data syntheses are among the largest computations of their kind ever undertaken. They are made possible by high-end computing resources provided by NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.

ECCO model-data syntheses are being used to quantify the ocean's role in the global carbon cycle, to understand the recent evolution of the polar oceans, to monitor time-evolving heat, water, and chemical exchanges within and between different components of the Earth system, and for many other science applications.

In the particular model-data synthesis used for this visualization, only the larger, ocean basin-wide scales have been adjusted to fit observations. Smaller-scale ocean currents are free to evolve on their own according to the computer model's equations. Due to the limited resolution of this particular model, only the larger eddies are represented, and tend to look more 'perfect' than they are in real life. Despite these model limitations, the visualization offers a realistic study in both the order and the chaos of the circulating waters that populate Earth's ocean.

Data used by the ECCO project include: sea surface height from NASA's Topex/Poseidon, Jason-1, and Ocean Surface Topography Mission/Jason-2 satellite altimeters; gravity from the NASA/German Aerospace Center Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment mission; surface wind stress from NASA's QuikScat mission; sea surface temperature from the NASA/Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer-EOS; sea ice concentration and velocity data from passive microwave radiometers; and temperature and salinity profiles from shipborne casts, moorings and the international Argo ocean observation system. More

 

Adapting to a warmer world: No going back

When Superstorm Sandy hit the US coast last month, it blew millions of New Yorkers back into the nineteenth century.

The southern part of Manhattan went black after floodwaters shorted out electrical systems. With the subway system disabled, many residents resorted to traversing the island by foot, and water supplies in some areas became contaminated with bacteria and pollutants.

The largest Atlantic hurricane on record, Sandy wreaked US$50 billion in economic losses along the US northeast coast, providing a costly reminder of how ill-prepared even the richest nations are for weather extremes. Some recent weather disasters have now been attributed, at least in part, to human activity, including the 2003 European heatwave¹ and the floods in England in 2000 (ref. 2). According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), storms, floods and droughts will strike more frequently and with greater strength as the climate warms³. And if nations are struggling to cope now, how will they manage in a warmer, harsher future?

Just a decade ago, 'adaptation' was something of a dirty word in the climate arena — an insinuation that nations could continue with business as usual and deal with the mess later. But greenhouse-gas emissions are increasing at an unprecedented rate and countries have failed to negotiate a successor to the Kyoto Protocol climate treaty. That stark reality has forced climate researchers and policy-makers to explore ways to weather some of the inevitable changes.Nature special:nature.com/kyoto

“As progress to reduce emissions has slowed in most countries, there has been a turn towards adaptation,” says Jon Barnett, a political geographer at the University of Melbourne in Australia.

Adaptation has tended to focus on hard defences, such as shoring up sea walls and building dams. But as awareness of adaptation has grown, so too has the concept. “Adaptation means different things to different people, and is extremely location specific,” says Neil Adger, an environmental and economic geographer at the University of Exeter, UK. Although residents in Bangladesh can raise their houses on stilts to survive floods, some settlements in Alaska and the Maldives must move in the face of rising sea levels. More

 

Watching Sandy, Ignoring Climate Change

A couple of weeks ago, Munich Re, one of the world’s largest reinsurance firms, issued a study titled “Severe Weather in North America.”

According to the press release that accompanied the report, “Nowhere in the world is the rising number of natural catastrophes more evident than in North America.” The number of what Munich Re refers to as “weather-related loss events,” and what the rest of us would probably call weather-related disasters, has quintupled over the last three decades. While many factors have contributed to this trend, including an increase in the number of people living in flood-prone areas, the report identified global warming as one of the major culprits: “Climate change particularly affects formation of heat-waves, droughts, intense precipitation events, and in the long run most probably also tropical cyclone intensity.”

Munich Re’s report was aimed at the firm’s clients—other insurance companies—and does not make compelling reading for a general audience. But its appearance just two weeks ahead of Hurricane Sandy seems to lend it a peculiarly grisly relevance. Sandy has been called a “superstorm,” a “Frankenstorm,” a “freakish and unprecedented monster,” and possibly “unique in the annals of American weather history.” It has already killed sixty-five people in the Caribbean, and, although it’s too early to tell what its full impact will be as it churns up the East Coast, loss estimates are topping six billion dollars.

As with any particular “weather-related loss event,” it’s impossible to attribute Sandy to climate change. However, it is possible to say that the storm fits the general pattern in North America, and indeed around the world, toward more extreme weather, a pattern that, increasingly, can be attributed to climate change. Just a few weeks before the Munich Re report appeared, scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in New York, published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on the apparent increase in extreme heat waves. Extreme summertime heat, which just a few decades ago affected much less than one per cent of the earth’s surface, “now typically covers about 10% of the land area,” the paper observed. “It follows that we can state, with a high degree of confidence, that extreme anomalies”—i.e., heat waves—“such as those in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010 were a consequence of global warming because their likelihood in the absence of global warming was exceedingly small.” It is worth noting that one of several forces fuelling Sandy is much-higher-than-average sea-surface temperatures along the East Coast.

Coming as it is just a week before Election Day, Sandy makes the fact that climate change has been entirely ignored during this campaign seem all the more grotesque. In a year of record-breaking temperatures across the U.S., record drought conditions in the country’s corn belt, and now a record storm affecting the nation’s most populous cities, neither candidate found the issue to be worthy of discussion. Pressed about this finally the other day on MTV, President Obama called climate change a “critical issue” that he was “surprised” hadn’t come up during any of the debates, a response that was at once completely accurate and totally disingenuous. (Asone commentator pointed out, he might have brought up this “critical” issue on his own since “he is the friggin’ POTUS.”) More

 

 

 

Assessing the Damage From Hurricane Sandy

What will climate change bring to New York next year?

Wastewater

Five of New York’s 14 wastewater treatment plants are in the lowest-lying areas of the city, within the mandatory evacuation zone. When the plants get filled to capacity or flooded, sewage and stormwater mix and bypass the plant, flowing directly into New York’s waterways — and now, into flooded streets and buildings.

 

Subways and Railroads

By Tuesday evening, subway and commuter rail service remained suspended, and limited bus service was set to resume at 5 p.m. Joseph J. Lhota, chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, said that damage to the subway system was being assessed, and that service would be restored in pieces. Tunnels under the East River were all flooded and pumping had begun at some of them. Mr. Lhota said that flooding was “literally up to the ceiling” at the South Street subway station in Lower Manhattan. Long Island Railroad remained closed due to flooding on the tracks. Two Metro-North lines north of 59th Street continued to be without power, and Mr. Lhota estimated that there were at least 100 trees downed on the tracks. Staten Island ferry and railway service were also still suspended. In New Jersey, Gov. Chris Christie said there was “major damage on each and every one of New Jersey’s rail lines.” New Jersey Transit and PATH service remained suspended.

Work Begins on Flooded Subways

Seven subway tunnels under the East River were still flooded on Tuesday, most of them in Lower Manhattan, where a 14-foot storm surge topped subway entrances and grates.

More

It is a horrible event and a rough lesson for any city and country to experience, however, I know that residents of Small Island Developing Stares (SIDS) and Arctic Communities will sympathize and commiserate with the residents of New York and other devastated area of the East Coast of the United States.

This however, is what residents of Small Island Developing Stares (SIDS) and Arctic Communities either go through or have the possibility of being faced, with every year. I therefore sincerely hope that the United States will become more cognizant of what the future holds for SIDS and Arctic communities, and support our adaption and mitigation efforts both financially and in the International Community by supporting international climate change treaties that will bring about a lowering of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere, our only Home. Editor

 

 

Sea Level Rise Threatens Countries, Regions And Cities Around The World

With sea levels expected to rise by as much as three feet by the year 2100, in large part due to climate change, low-lying countries and coastal cities face an unprecedented challenge this century. Recent research indicated that in the next several centuries, average global sea levels could rise somewhere between 18 and 29 feet, explains Climate Central, a nonprofit climate news and research organization.

Much of this potential sea level rise may be spurred by glacial melting in the world's polar regions. James Hansen, a professor at Columbia University and head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has said that the global goal to limit atmospheric warming to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) "is actually a prescription for long-term disaster." Hansen fears, LiveScience reported, that with warming of two degrees, we could see an ice-free Arctic and a notable rise in sea-levels by tens of meters.

An increasing number of studies are making the connections between human activities, climate change and a rise in extreme weather events. Hansen recently wrotein The Washington Post, "our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change." Referring to extreme weather events in the past decade in North America and Europe, he wrote, "The odds that natural variability created these extremes are minuscule, vanishingly small. To count on those odds would be like quitting your job and playing the lottery every morning to pay the bills."

Although many of the locations on the list below of low-lying areas are outside of North America, the U.S. is not immune from sea level rise. A recent report from the U.S. Geological Survey found that there is a "hotspot" along the U.S. East Coast, where rates of sea level rise are increasing about three to four times more than the global average and could "increase the vulnerability of coastal cities to flooding, and beaches and wetlands to deterioration."

On the West Coast, most of the California coast will see a six inch sea level rise by 2030 and an average rise of 3 feet by 2100, according to a study by the National Research Council. More

 

Satellites See Unprecedented Greenland Ice Sheet Surface Melt

July 24, 2012: For several days this month, Greenland's surface ice cover melted over a larger area than at any time in more than 30 years of satellite observations. Nearly the entire ice cover of Greenland, from its thin, low-lying coastal edges to its two-mile-thick center, experienced some degree of melting at its surface, according to measurements from three independent satellites analyzed by NASA and university scientists.

On average in the summer, about half of the surface of Greenland's ice sheet naturally melts. At high elevations, most of that melt water quickly refreezes in place. Near the coast, some of the melt water is retained by the ice sheet and the rest is lost to the ocean. But this year the extent of ice melting at or near the surface jumped dramatically. According to satellite data, an estimated 97 percent of the ice sheet surface thawed at some point in mid-July.

Researchers have not yet determined whether this extensive melt event will affect the overall volume of ice loss this summer and contribute to sea level rise.

"The Greenland ice sheet is a vast area with a varied history of change. This event, combined with other natural but uncommon phenomena, such as the large calving event last week on Petermann Glacier, are part of a complex story," said Tom Wagner, NASA's cryosphere program manager in Washington. "Satellite observations are helping us understand how events like these may relate to one another as well as to the broader climate system." More

 

To Sleep With Open Eyes

I took a good look at Obama in the famous “Summit Meeting”. Sometimes he was overcome by tiredness, he unwillingly shut his eyes but, at times, he slept with open eyes.

The Cartagena Summit was not a meeting of a trade union of misinformed presidents, but a meeting among official representatives of 33 countries of this hemisphere. The overwhelming majority of them are asking for solutions to the most pressing economic and social problems that affect the region with the most unequal distribution of wealth in the world.

I do not wish to get ahead of the opinions of millions of persons, capable of making and in-depth and objective analysis of the problems affecting Latin America, the Caribbean and the rest of a globalized world, where a few has it all and the rest has nothing. The system imposed by imperialism in this hemisphere, whatever its name, is worn out and unsustainable.

In the near future, humanity will have to cope, among others, with the problems associated to climate change, security and the production of food for the ever-growing world population.

Excessive rainfall is affecting both Colombia and Venezuela. A recent analysis revealed that on March this year, high temperatures in the US were 4.8 Centigrade degrees hotter than the all-time average. The consequences of those changes, which are well known in the capitals of the main European countries, give rise to catastrophic problems for humanity.

Peoples expect political leaders to provide clear answers to these problems. More




 

IOC Assesses Climate Vulnerability of South-West Indian Ocean Islands

13 April 2012: The Indian Ocean Commission (IOC) project on climate change adaptation, titled "Acclimate," has released five assessments of climate change vulnerability in the South-West Indian Ocean islands of the Comoros, Madagascar, Mauritius, Reunion (France) and the Seychelles.

For each case, the reports provide qualitative assessments of climate vulnerability across various sectors including: integrated water management; fisheries; risk and disaster management; energy; food security; and security and sovereignty.

According to the assessment reports, these countries face shared challenges due to climate change, such as water scarcity, extreme weather events, sea level rise and coastal erosion, and coral bleaching. The common methodological framework across all five assessments has allowed production of a regional strategy for climate change adaptation, which will be submitted for political acceptance by the concerned countries at the end of 2012.

Acclimate, which started in 2008, was commenced to strengthen the capacity of South-West Indian Ocean island States to adapt to climate change. The assessments aim to share knowledge and contribute to mainstreaming climate issues into national and regional policy processes. [Acclimate Website (in French)] [Comoros Assessment Report] [Madagascar Assessment Report] [Mauritius Assessment Report] [La Réunion (France) Assessment Report] [Seychelles Assessment Report] [Synthesis and Roadmap to a Regional Strategy for Climate Change Adaptation] [Indian Ocean Commission Website] More



 

Choking on Rising Fuel Costs for Electricity, Barbados Launches Multiple Source-Multiple Use Renewable Energy Plan

Another sign of the rapidly changing (for the better) energy landscape: the southeastern Caribbean island nation of Barbados is taking an integrated, multiple source-multiple use approach as it launches a program to shift away from its almost total reliance on imported fossil fuel imports to clean, homegrown renewable sources for electricity generation and other uses.

The Barbadian cabinet on April 5 approved the US$188.5 million Mangrove Pond Green Energy Complex, according to a Caribbean Journal report. The complex is to include solar power and wind power facilities, a new Mechanical Maintenance Facility, a Waste-to-Energy Facility, and a Landfill Gas Management System.

In total, the Barbadian government expects the Mangrove Pond Green Energy Complex to produce more than 25 MW of clean electrical power that can be sold on to the island nation’s grid, reducing dependence on fossil fuels and helping reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Barbados relies almost entirely (96%) on fuel oil and diesel to generate electricity; 90% of it imported. That’s comparable to what the island nation spends on education. Barbados’s bill for oil imports in 2009 and 2010 totaled some $230 million, which amounts to nearly 6% of national GDP, about what it spends on education, Senator Darcy Boyce was quoted as saying in a Barbados Today article.

Barbados’s Sustainable Energy Framework

The government intends to reduce Barbados’s oil import bill significantly, Boyce, who heads the Prime Minister’s Energy Office, told attendees gathered for the launch of the Energy Efficiency Awareness Programme of the Sustainable Energy Framework for Barbados Pilot Project.

The aim of the Sustainable Energy Framework for Barbados Pilot Project is to reduce fossil fuel use by some 30% by bringing renewable energy resources online, and to reduce electricity demand by over 21% by implementing energy efficiency measures and technologies over a 20-year period. TheInter-American Development Bank (IADB) is contributing $1 million in investment grants and loans through the World Bank Group’s Global Environment Facility (GEF).

Rising global market prices for crude oil and derivatives have been rising consistently for several years, putting greater financial pressure on local businesses and residents alike. The direct effect rising fuel costs have on ratepayers’ pocketbooks and businesses’ operating budgets is compounded by the indirect effects, as they flow through into prices of all imports and are passed on to consumers. More