The last 250 years of human history have vastly changed out planet. During this time, human activities have greatly transformed geologically significant conditions and processes. The change is so immense that many geologists now refer to our current time as the Anthropocene – a word coined in 2000 by Eugene Stoermer and Paul Crutzen, a Nobel-winning Dutch chemist. The word…
Category: Climate Change
Energy Efficiency Can Save Big Money And Greenhouse-Gas Emissions In Urban Transport Systems
The International Energy Agency just released a new report that shows how energy efficiency of urban transport systems could facilitate savings of up to USD 70 trillion that would be spent on vehicles, fuel and transportation infrastructure from now until 2050. The report, A Tale of Renewed Cities, draws on examples from more than 30…
Siberian Cave Climate Records Indicate Permafrost Melt
Climate records from Siberian caves suggest an impending permafrost thaw and a resulting global warming acceleration. Permafrost regions cover 24% of the northern hemisphere land surface, and hold an estimated 17,000 Gt of organic carbon. Thawing releases CO2 and CH4, creating positive feedback during greenhouse warming. The researchers, led by Gideon Henderson at the University of…
Temperature Change Over The Last 100 Years – Fastest on Record For Past 11,000 Years
A team of scientists just published a record of global temperatures in the journal Science that dates back to the end of the last ice age, about 11,000 years ago. As summarized in a brief note on National Public Radio, this global temperature compilation gives us a jolting view of temperature change over the last…
Climate Change News
In reading through the torrent of recent news on climate change, I’ve come across a few events that stand out. Following is a brief summary of each taken from the original source: Nicholas Stern: ‘I got it wrong on climate change – it’s far, far worse’ by Heather Stewart and Larry Elliott, The Observer, guardian.co.uk…
Climate Change Impact on Earth Surface Systems
As Congress continues to stonewall on climate change legislation, I think that a recent article published in the Perspectives section of Nature Climate Change, The impacts of climate change on terrestrial Earth surface systems, is worth contemplating. The authors, Jasper Knight and Stephan Harrison, argue that “… at present, governments’ attempts to limit greenhouse-gas emissions…
2012 – Warmest Year on Record
NOAA’s National Climate Data Center (NCDC) announced today that 2012 was the warmest year on record for the contiguous U.S in over a century of record keeping. The average temperature for 2012 was 55.3°F. This is 3.2°F above the 20th century average and is 1.0°F above the previous 1998 record. Other temperature notables for 2012…
Constructing A Paleotemperature Record As A Check On Global Surface Thermometer Records
An independent global surface (GST) temperature record was recently compiled from several geological and historical sources. David Anderson, of the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climate Data Center, USA, and several colleagues constructed a Paleo Index which is based upon 173 temperature-sensitive proxy time series. As noted by Anderson and others in their paper…
Coal Could Overtake Oil As Number 1 Global Energy Source By 2017
I watched a coal unit train zip through the Belgrade-Bozeman, Montana, area yesterday. The Montana Rail Link unit train was 125 cars in length and presumably bound for Pacific Northwest seaports. The coal is sourced from the Powder River Basin, an approximately 20,000-acre part of Wyoming that supplies about 40 percent of U.S. coal. An…
Largest Ice Calving Event Caught on Video
As part of the filming for the documentary,Chasing Ice, two filmmakers caught a massive calving event of a Greenland glacier (see the accompanying YouTube video, via The Guardian, inserted below). One of the filmmakers, James Balog, said the event is like seeing “Manhattan breaking apart in front of your eyes”. Chasing Ice chronicles climate change’s impact on Arctic…
2 Degrees Celsius – An Inevitable Global Average Temperature Increase?
The Global Carbon Project’s recent analysis on current carbon dioxide emissions published in the latest issue of Nature Climate Change underscores the necessity for action in emission reduction. The commentary’s authors concluded that the rapid growth in fossil fuel emissions makes a global average temperature increase of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) inevitable. It…
Polar Ice Melting Fast
A new study published in Science on 11/30/2012 shows that the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are losing more than three times as much ice each year as they were in the 1990s. The melting of ice, two thirds of which has occurred in Greenland, has raised sea levels by 11.1 millimeters since 1992. The study is the combined work…
Sea Levels Rising 60% Faster Than IPCC Projections
New research published yesterday, 11/28/2012, in IOP Publishing’s journal Environmental Research Letters, reports that sea levels are actually rising at a rate of 3.2 mm a year compared to the best estimate of 2 mm a year in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) fourth assessment report (AR4). The study’s focus was to analyze…
Ocean Acidification and Climate Change
A news item caught my interest recently – a National Public Radio (NPR) news segment of 11/23/2012 on whether shellfish can adapt to increasingly acidic oceans (NPR shellfish link). Because UN Climate Talks opened in Doha, Qatar today, I thought it would be an appropriate time to talk about ocean acidification trends. As noted by…
Hurricane Sandy – A Predicted Event of Climate Change
Earlier this year, a peer-reviewed paper, Physically based assessment of hurricane surge threat under climate change, (PDF bypasses Nature’s paywall) was published in the journal Nature Climate Change. The authors predicted more frequent storm surges for New York City due to the changing climate. The abstract from the paper follows: Storm surges are responsible for…