Symptom, threat, feedback
Stephen Leahy: Forest fires to double or triple in a warmer world. Another symptom, threat and feedback.
Guardian: Rising seas will put 12 of 19 UK nuclear sites at risk of flooding. Once more, a symptom, threat and (insofar as one form of lower carbon energy generation is put at risk and thereby taken offline) feedback.
Bill McGuire: The surprising link between climate change and volcanoes and earthquakes . Until recently, it was thought that at least a few natural disasters could be considered still "natural". But this geophysics professor claims otherwise. The link is in the weight of melting ice. So much ice is now melting (or is likely to soon be) that the shifting weight on the earth's crusts could spur increased volcanism and earthquakes. Symptom, threat and feedback.
Carbon Brief: Ocean acidification proceeding ten times faster than any point in the last 300 million years. Symptom (of high carbon dioxide levels, if not climate change directly), threat and feedback (insofar as rising acidity reduces the capacity of the oceans to act as an atmospheric carbon sink). The threat here is large. According to this paper, left unchecked, we are likely on course for another marine mass extinction.
Yahoo: A piece of better news. US dream homes turning green. More than half of US homebuyers consider energy efficiency and other environmental considerations to be important in the selection of a potential purchase.
The Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO have published the State of the Climate 2012, an update on climate observations from an Australian context. It is summarised here. A summary of the summary: greenhouse gases, land and ocean surface temperatures and sea levels are all still rising. Australia is still heading towards a significantly hotter, drier and more flood-prone future.
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12 comments:
Mongabay: Climate change could increase fires, logging, and hunting in rainforests.
Where beetles and fire meet.
"we're definitely seeing much longer fire seasons in many parts of the country, another 60 or 70 days longer than what we used to experience. [...] We're also seeing much more severe fire behaviour than we've ever experienced in the past,"
Greenland ice sheet might be doomed by 1.6ºC. Ouch. Previously, the best estimate was 3.1ºC. Of course, it is probably going to take hundreds of years even in the worst case scenarios, but it doesn't need to all melt before it becomes a huge problem.
Leahy: Updated/alternative version of the fire article.
Miami Herald: Sea level rise in Florida is an imminent, not distant, concern.
DD: Oyster die-off linked to ocean acidification.
Yale360: Fred Pearce reviews the Bill McGuire book on CC and earthquakes.
Hot Topic: Review of McGuire's book Waking the Giant on CC and seismic activity.
Mongabay: Deforestation in Latin Amercia. Some stats and graphs.
Stephen Leahy: Northern forests in a warming world - another potential carbon bomb.
Ocean acidification: A basic primer with FAQs. Good resource.
Ocean acidification: Science faces the fate of the sea.
"Some of the findings could come from a horror movie: Toxic algae such as those that cause paralytic shellfish poisoning (“red tide”) and amnesiac shellfish poisoning (the inspiration for Hitchcock’s The Birds) become more toxic yet when CO2 saturation rises and levels of certain minerals fall. More CO2 (which means more acidity or less alkalinity) plus warmer water makes European crab shells “bleed calcium” — i.e., dissolve. Scampi’s claws get so brittle they snap off. Summer flounder lose cartilage and suffer liver damage and deformed muscle. Lowering the pH level by .3 points (which doubles the acidity level, as you doubtless recall from high school chemistry) cuts their survival by half.
"Since humans began spewing industrial-scale quantities of carbon into the air, oceanic surface pH has fallen by more than .1 point, to about 8.1 — faster than any past change uncovered in the geological record. If it falls by .3 points more it will reach what coral experts call a “critical threshold.” Below pH 7.8, one warned in Monterey, “reef development ceases.”
"The effects extend beyond unlucky critters and imperiled ecosystems; they feed back to the climate itself. Through a chemical knock-on process, the ocean’s uptake of CO2 reduces its production of another compound, dimethylsulfide (DMS). This marine DMS is the largest natural source of sulfur in the atmosphere, and that sulfur screens out solar radiation. Less sulfur means more planetary warming—compounding the impact of carbon emissions."
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