Andes’ Tropical Glaciers Going Fast, May Soon Be Gone

LONDON — The glaciers of the tropical Andes have shrunk by between 30 and 50 percent in 30 years and many will soon disappear altogether, cutting off the summer water supply for millions of people, according to scientists studying the region’s climate.

Their findings are particularly significant because glaciers in the tropics, 99 percent of which are in the Andes, are regarded as among the most sensitive indicators of climate change on the planet, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

 The Pastoruri glacier, located in Northern Peru in the Andes.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons

In the Andes glaciers contribute to irrigation, hydroelectricity generation, and water supply. For example, 15 percent of the water consumed in La Paz, the capital of Bolivia, comes from glaciers, a figure that doubles in the summer. The region, with 3.5 million people, is heavily dependent on melt water for its survival (and see our story of 25 January, Andean glaciers show record melting).

Many of the crops along hundreds of kilometers on the dry eastern slopes of the Andes rely on irrigation from glacier melt water in the summer.

The research covers 300 years of glacier history in South America. The glaciers reached their maximum extent during what is termed the Little Ice Age, between 1650 and 1730, when the world was colder. Rivers like the Thames in London and Seine in Paris froze over during some winters.

By studying rocky debris piled up during the Little Ice Age and then left behind as the glaciers retreated after 1750 the researchers have been able to chart their progress.

link to article

Extreme Drought To Extreme Flood: Weather Whiplash Hits The Midwest

A 2010 study found “global warming is the main cause of a significant intensification in the North Atlantic Subtropical High that in recent decades has more than doubled the frequency of abnormally wet or dry summer weather in the southeastern United States.” Below, meteorologist Dr. Jeff Masters relates how wild climate swings are becoming the norm in the Midwest, too.–JR

Runoff from heavy rains flooded parts of a cemetery in St. Louis County on April 18, 2013. (Photo credit: Robert Cohen)

By Jeff Masters, via Weather Underground

It seems like just a few months ago barges were scraping bottom on the Mississippi River, and the Army Corps of Engineers was blowing up rocks on the bottom of the river to allow shipping to continue. Wait, it was just a few months ago–less than four months ago! Water levels on the Mississippi River at St. Louis bottomed out at -4.57′ on January 1 of 2013, the 9th lowest water level since record keeping began in 1861, and just 1.6′ above the all-time low-water record set in 1940 (after the great Dust Bowl drought of the 1930s.)

But according to National Weather Service, the exceptional April rains and snows over the Upper Mississippi River watershed will drive the river by Tuesday to a height 45 feet higher than on January 1. The latest forecast calls for the river to hit 39.4′ on Tuesday, which would be the 8th greatest flood in history at St. Louis, where flood records date back to 1861. Damaging major flooding is expected along a 250-mile stretch of the Mississippi from Quincy, Illinois to Thebes, Illinois next week.

At the Alton, Illinois gauge, upstream from St.Louis, a flood height of 34′ is expected on Tuesday. This would be the 6th highest flood in Alton since 1844, and damages to commercial property in the town of Alton occur at this water level. In addition, record flooding is expected on at least five rivers in Illinois and Michigan over the next few days. A crest 1.5′ above the all-time record has already occurred on the Des Plaines River in Chicago. This river has invasive Asian Carp that could make their way into Lake Michigan if a 13-mile barrier along the river fails during an extreme flood. Fortunately, NPR in Michigan is reporting today that U.S. Army Corps of Engineers crews stationed along the 13-mile Asian carp barrier have seen no evidence of the fish breaching the structure, and it would have taken a flood much larger than today’s record flood to breach the structure. A crest on the Grand River in Grand Rapids, Michigan nearly 4′ above the previous record (period of record: at least 113 years) is expected this weekend. At this flood level, major flooding of residential areas is expected, though the flood wall protecting downtown Grand Rapids will keep the commercial center of the city from flooding.

link to article

From 2012 to 2013, March Blows Hot, Then Cold

link to article

March is finally on its way out, but not before leaving its mark in the unusually cold and snowy weather that affected much of the U.S., Europe, and parts of Asia. The chilly weather has come courtesy of a stuck weather pattern that has repeatedly directed blasts of cold Arctic air southward, while leaving Greenland and northeastern Canada much warmer than average for this time of year. 

Think of the Arctic as the Northern Hemisphere’s refrigerator. The blocked weather pattern — which some scientists think may be tied to the rapid warming of the Arctic and the subsequent loss of sea ice cover — has opened the refrigerator door, causing cold air to spill out of the freezer that is the Far North and help develop winter storms in the northern mid-latitudes. One such storm occupied much of the Northern Atlantic on Thursday, stretching from just south of Greenland all the way east to Ireland and Spain.

The cold weather this month has been in stark contrast to last March, when an unprecedentedly long-lasting andintense early spring heat wave sent temperatures soaring into the 80s all the way to the U.S. border with Canada. 

The interactive graphic above shows a comparison between the temperature departures from average during March of 2013 (through March 28) and March 2012. 

One of the things to note is that although the extent of the warm weather last March corresponds well to the area affected by the cold this year, the magnitude of the warmth during the 2012 heat wave was far greater than the severity of this year’s cold weather. 

This can also be seen by examining the number and characteristics of the temperature records set during the warm March of 2012 and the cold March this year. 

In March 2012, the ratio of warm temperature records to cold temperature records was extraordinarily lopsided, at about 15 to 1. But in March 2013, cold temperature records are only beating warm records by about a 2-to-1 ratio, according to data from the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, N.C.

Climate Change Will Harm Mekong Basin Harvests

link to article

LONDON – One of the most fertile areas of south east Asia, the Lower Mekong Basin, faces a bleak future from the impacts of climate change, according to a U.S.-funded study.

The lead author of the study, Dr. Jeremy Carew-Reid, says some of its findings are “very shocking.”

Hotter and wetter rainy seasons and more long-lasting dry seasons in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam will jeopardize the region’s reputation as one of the world’s major producers of crops on which hundreds of millions depend. Climate change will also have a profound economic impact in the region.

The fertility of the region around the Mekong will suffer due to a changing climate.
Credit: Thomas Schoch

“We’ve found that this region is going to experience climate extremes in temperature and rainfall beyond anything that we expected”, says Dr. Carew-Reid.

The Basin is known for its production of maize and rice, the two grains with the highest worldwide production levels. Rice provides more than a fifth of the calories consumed by humans. The study forecasts fundamental shifts in the kinds of crops that can be grown in parts of the Basin.

The USAID-funded Climate Change Adaptation and Impact Study for the Lower Mekong examines how changes in temperature and precipitation will affect growing conditions and yields for major crops including not only maize and rice but rubber, cassava, soya and coffee, and  how fisheries and livestock productivity will be affected.

There’s general international agreement that global average temperatures should if possible be prevented from rising more than 2°C above their pre-industrial level, although most climate scientists believe it’s now too late to stop temperatures rising further.

A global average rise of 2°C is expected to mean that parts of the tropics like the Mekong Basin will warm by between 4°C and 6°C by mid-century. The impacts will vary, but all the Lower Mekong countries are likely to see big changes in the suitability of land for important crops.

March 27 News: Melting Arctic Sea Ice Drives Extreme Weather, U.S Military Planning

link to article

Most of the Arctic sea ice that forms each year melts in the spring and summer, which affects global weather patterns and U.S. military planning. [NBC News]

“There are tremendous two-way and multiple interactions between the Arctic and the rest of the world,” retired Rear Adm. David Titley said during the teleconference organized by Climate Nexus, a group trying to raise awareness about climate change.

Experts tied the melting ice in the Arctic to the recent spate of stormy winter weather in parts of the U.S. and Europe. They also noted that the prospect of ice-free summers in the Arctic as soon as 2030 is already impacting international trade and U.S. Navy plans to protect Arctic resources.

The briefing was held the day after the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) announced that the Arctic sea ice reached its maximum reach for the year on March 15, covering 5.84 million square miles. This is the sixth lowest maximum sea ice coverage in the 35-year satellite record.

Melting season starts: Arctic sea ice hit its maximum for the year, and it’s the 6th lowest on record. [Climate Central]

Yesterday the Obama Administration announced a plan to help wildlife adapt to the threats posed by climate change. [LA Times]

Vice Admiral Lee Gunn (ret.) is in Texas to explain how national security is threatened by climate change, and how naval bases are already being rebuilt due to sea level rise. [NPR Texas]

The governors of Oregon and Washington are imploring the White House to consider climate change when it looks at environmental impacts of coal export terminals. [The Hill]

New York State may be the first to tell bondholders that climate change is a risk to their investments. [Bloomberg]

The city of Melbourne, Australia, is now carbon-neutral by virtue of emissions reductions and offsets. [Climate Group]

A new study finds that if you add lignin (a worthless byproduct of corn/ethanol) to concrete, the concrete gets 32% stronger — allowing you to use less carbon-intensive cement. [EarthTechling]

Coral reefs in southern Florida have declined by 50 percent over the last twenty years. [Climate Adaptation]

Community solar will allow electricity-hungry Orlando residents to buy solar power for 13 cents a kw/h, guaranteed for 25 years. And the solar installation is over a parking lot! [EarthTechling]

They call it the “oil & gas industry” for a reason: the next CEO of the American Natural Gas Alliance comes from the American Petroleum Institute. [The Hill]

An aluminum-air battery, used as an emergency one-time backup for an electric car, could carry you 1,000 miles at once. [CleanTechnica]

Climate change is rewriting the world’s wine list, causing vinyards to consider importing grapes from warmer latitudes, and messing with the finesse of Languedoc. [Discovery]

As Scientists Predicted, Global Warming Continues

link to article

By Dr. Jeff Masters, via Weather Underground

One often hears the statement in the media that global warming stopped in 1998, or that there has been no global warming for the past 16 years. Why pick 16 years? Why not some nice round number like 20 years? Or better yet, 30 years, since the climate is generally defined as the average weather experienced over a period of 30 years or longer?

Temperatures at Earth’s surface undergo natural, decades-long warming and cooling trends, related to the La Niña/El Niño cycle and the 11-year sunspot cycle. The reason one often hears the year 1998 used as a base year to measure global temperature trends is that this is a cherry-picked year.

An extraordinarily powerful El Niño event that was the strongest on record brought about a temporary increase in surface ocean temperatures over a vast area of the tropical Pacific that year, helping boost global surface temperatures to the highest levels on record (global temperatures were warmer in both 2005 and 2010, but not by much.) But in the years from 2005 – 2012, La Niña events have been present for at least a portion of every single year, helping keep Earth’s surface relatively cool.

Thus, if one draws a straight-line fit of global surface temperatures from 1998 to 2012, a climate trend showing little global warming results. If one picks any year prior to 1998, or almost any year after 1998, a global warming trend does result. The choice of 1998 is a deliberate abuse of statistics in an attempt to manipulate people into drawing a false conclusion on global temperature trends. One of my favorite examples of this manipulation of statistics is shown an animated graph called “The Escalator”, created by skepticalscience.com (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Average of NASA’s GISS, NOAA”s NCDC, and the UK Met Office’s HadCRUT4 monthly global surface temperature departures from average, from January 1970 through November 2012 (blue), with linear trends applied to the time frames Jan ’70 – Oct ’77, Apr ’77 – Dec ’86, Sep ’87 – Nov ’96, Jun ’97 – Dec ’02, Nov ’02 – Nov ’12. Climate change skeptics like to emphasize the shorter term fluctuations in global temperatures (blue lines) and ignore the long-term climate trend (red line.) The global surface temperature trend from January 1970 through November 2012 (red line) is +0.16°C (+0.29°F) per decade. Image credit: skepticalscience.com.

Correcting for natural causes to find the human contribution to global temperature changes

Greening Tundra Shows Impacts of Spreading Warmth

LONDON — The Arctic is on the move. The North Pole is in the same place, but Arctic conditions have begun to shift. A study of 30 years of satellite data confirms that the difference in temperatures between the seasons has diminished.

Conditions now have shifted the equivalent of four or five degrees of latitude southward. At the same time, vegetation has moved north, colonizing the thawing permafrost.

Studies show vegetation now growing nearly 500 miles further north than it did a few decades ago.
Credit: ADialla via Climate News Network.

A team of 21 scientists from 17 institutions in seven nations reports in Nature Climate Change that as the cover of snow and ice has diminished and retreated in the Arctic Circle, the temperatures have begun to increase — at differing rates — during the four seasons. Although conditions differ from region to region, overall the growing season is beginning earlier, and the autumn freeze is starting later.

Conditions in northern latitudes now increasingly resemble those found several hundred miles further south 30 years ago. One of the authors, Bruce Forbes of the University of Lapland in Finland, told the Climate News Network that in his own research region of north-west Siberia “we are seeing more frequent and longer-lasting high pressure systems. In winter, the snow cover comes later, is deeper on average than in the 1960s, but is melting out earlier in spring.”

Climate is a complicated business, and there is always legitimate room for argument about the validity of one selected set of measurements, a potential bias in the observations, or the reliability of comparison data collected two generations earlier.

But vegetables can’t be fooled. Plants grow where they can. If deciduous shrubs are growing taller, and colonizing sites ever further north, then conditions must be getting warmer, and staying warmer.

Winners — and Losers

Professor Forbes says that indigenous reindeer herders report that alder and willow, normally stunted by the polar winter, are growing taller: his own research team has confirmed this with dendrochronology, the science of tree ring measurement.

“In a few decades, if the current trends continue, much more of the existing low shrub tundra will start to resemble woodlands as the shrubs become tree-sized”, he says.

link to article