Moderated Global Warming Discussion

[macdoc]

21 November 2012 Last updated at 06:00 ET

Climate change evident across Europe, says report
By Mark Kinver Environment reporter, BBC News

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/64260000/jpg/_64260240_tiberromegetty.jpg
Flooded properties as the River Tiber, Rome, breaches its banks (Getty Images) The cost of damage from extreme weather events is projected to increase in the future

The effects of climate change are already evident in Europe and the situation is set to get worse, the European Environment Agency has warned.

In a report, the agency says the past decade in Europe has been the warmest on record.

It adds that the cost of damage caused by extreme weather events is rising, and the continent is set to become more vulnerable in the future.

The findings have been published ahead of next week's UN climate conference.

They join a UN Environment Programme report also released on Wednesday showing dangerous growth in the "emissions gap" - the difference between current carbon emission levels and those needed to avert climate change.

"Every indicator we have in terms of giving us an early warning of climate change and increasing vulnerability is giving us a very strong signal," observed EEA executive director Jacqueline McGlade.

"It is across the board, it is not just global temperatures," she told BBC News.

"It is in human health aspects, in forests, sea levels, agriculture, biodiversity - the signals are coming in from right across the environment."

2C or not 2C

The report - Climate Change, Impacts and Vulnerabilities in Europe 2012 - involving more than 50 authors from a range of organisations, listed a number of "key messages", including:

* Observed climate change has "already led to a wide range of impacts on environmental systems and society; further climate change impacts are projected for the future";
* Climate change can increase existing vulnerabilities and deepen socio-economic imbalances in Europe;
* The combined impacts of projected climate change and socio-economic development is set to see the damage costs of extreme weather events continue to increase.

more
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20408350

It this were a war lead in, I'd say the drumbeats grow louder....maybe it is.
Oddly enough it seems that the weather is forcing the climate awareness

 

[aleCcowaN]

Just to share a couple of animations:

A home made one showing daily percentage of Greenland ice sheet that is in a melting state, for 1Jan1979 to 20Oct2012. The green line is the daily average for 1981-2010 (the "normal") [Clipped from images accessed at http://climate.rutgers.edu/measures...melt-25km-ease-grid-20-climate-data-record-0]

If you take a look to 2012, I am expecting the announcement of a record melting equivalent to about 1 mm ocean raise during this year. My expectation about the next couple of decades is Greenland abruptly becoming the major source of sea level raise -besides warming of the oceans itself-, which may have an important effect on galvanizing global action. I'll appreciate any link to current data or recent papers on this subject you may share here.

The other animation is that famous one showing aerosols:



Light blue represents salt, green is wild fires, orange is dessert dust and white is sulphate aerosols. If you pay attention to Madagascar, about 1:00 you can see the eruption of the volcano Karthala in Comoros (and you almost can't see the various eruptions of the Piton de la Fournace in Reunion around the same period).

About the white sulphates, China, Europe and Eastern North America are the major sources. You can also see how some sulphates are thrown in southeaster Australia, South Africa and Central Chile, countries that heavily rely on coal for power generation, while you can see little polution in the São Paulo-Rio region and Río de la Plata, with plenty access to hydroelectricity and natural gas power plants.

Again, I'll appreciate any recent paper of data about aerosols and actual change in light of these recent changes in coal use.

 

[macdoc]

cool - aerosols are a real unknown in this

Speaking of global action ....some heft here..

snip

The alliance of 200 investment institutions includes Scottish Widows, Aviva and HSBC and controls $21 trillion (£13trn) of assets worldwide and its lobbying of the UK government is part of a broader campaign to persuade the world’s biggest economies to escalate their actions against climate change.

The alliance’s call, which extends to countries such as the US, China and India, represents by far the biggest political intervention staged by financial investors over climate change and underlines just how concerned they have become about the damage it could inflict on the global economy.

“Hurricane Sandy, which caused more than $50bn (£31bn) in economic losses, is typical of what we can expect if no action is taken and warming trends continue,” said Chris Davis, a member of the alliance who advises institutions controlling $11trillion (£6.9 trn) on climate change issues.

“Investors are rightly concerned about the short and long-term economic risks of climate change and understand that ambitious climate and clean energy policies are urgently needed to avoid catastrophic impact,” Mr Davis added.

In a letter to the governments, ahead of the international climate negotiations that kick off in Doha on Monday, the alliance urges the world’s largest economies to engage in “a new dialogue on climate change policy”. In particular, it calls for “clear, consistent and predictable policies that encourage low carbon investment”.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...imate-risk-8329411.html?origin=internalSearch

 

[CapelDodger]

Speaking of global action ....some heft here..

Some weighty backs are being put into the task, there's no doubt of that, but the inertia to be overcome is colossal. There's a lot more real action in the Arctic resources field than in politics or diplomacy. And a lot more action in the weather, of course. No end of that.

Some progress in Australia and in some states and regions, but nothing on the global or even continental scale. The only upcoming event is the IPCC report, and the response to that will be to schedule another for 2020.

It would be tragic if it hadn't always been so bloody predictable. A great deal of unpleasantness is not going to be avoided nor adequately prepared for.

 

[CapelDodger]

I'm not so sure. I hope that after some climatic turmoil in a not so far future Europe will be brave enough to set differential custom duties based on GHG emissions.

The Airline Emissions Tax isn't faring too well against strong opposition from the Far East and the US.

Europe will probably cope with and prepare for climate turmoil in a well-coordinated manner; it's the sort of thing the EU does relatively well. In the international arena Europe has no clout to speak of at all, certainly not when the Chinese and North Americans are of a mind.

 

[bit_pattern]

Does anyone know a good debunking of this:

http://judithcurry.com/2011/07/07/climate-sensitivity-follow-up/

Some gimp on Curry's blog arguing that a figure from Foster & Gregory 2006 is flawed, I've had a quick look around but can't find much and I don't know enough about statistics to make heads or tails of it on my own.

 

[metzomagic]

The Airline Emissions Tax isn't faring too well against strong opposition from the Far East and the US.

While every man-made contribution to atmospheric CO2 is part of the problem, air travel is by no means as much of the problem as many assume it to be. About 3% according to Gavin Schmidt over at Real Climate. And it's not exactly the low hanging fruit in this battle to reduce emissions, is it? Trying to drastically curtail air travel will definitely have a large impact on the global economy.

So I tend to view blaming air travel for the CO2 problem as one of the "Hey, look, there goes a squirrel!" tactics that is used by deniers to draw attention away from the larger problems. And Al Gore usually appears in the same sentence whenever it is brought up.

What we really need to do is change the way we generate electricity to use mostly renewable sources, and then use this clean electricity to power our ground transport. If we can get rid of our dependency on coal in particular, this will solve a large portion of the problem.

 

[macdoc]

Yeah I agree - airlines are the not the issue and surprisingly not even the tar sands compared to coal.
That's why Hanson got himself arrested fighting against coal.

Switching coal plants to gas is at least a step in the right direction. Coal is not only bad from a C02 aspect but many others as well.

Airlines can and are switching to biofuels as the high cost nature of flying makes fuel a relatively low part of the cost tho it hurts in competition.
The US military is likely on lead in this area with their bio-fuel efforts.

 

[aleCcowaN]

True and not so true. If a tax is designed not to discourage an activity but to pay for the costs of disposing the "garbage" it creates, then air travel has no problem to finance it. The fact that something is technically essential doesn't mean it is not economically complementary. In a power plant working on coal, the cost of coal may be, some 30-50% of total costs, and disposing the CO2 a put-in-plant ton of coal produces may cost up to 15 times the cost of coal itself. Disposing of the CO2 generated in a round trip Buenos Aires - Paris -Buenos Aires may cost 90 bucks, some 6% of the best offer you can find in the lowest season (February). Of course some degree of cross-subsidies must be used, but I think that some specific taxation on aviation fuel that should total some 8 to 12% of air fares would be OK.

 

[metzomagic]

Alec, hi,

But how do you dispose of the CO2 generated by an airline flight? You can't. IMO, a carbon tax is instead intended to build the hidden, external costs (i.e. harmful environmental side-effects) of using a carbon-intensive power generating source into the price the consumer pays, so that renewable energy sources can compete on an equal footing.

 

[aleCcowaN]

I meant by carbon sequestration, as we don't need to remove the very same carbon dioxide molecules. Real one starts around 90-120 usd per ton of CO2 and being air transport slightly more than a minor contributor as you said, we can fairly think those prices will stay almost that low. Some forms of carbon storage are even cheaper. Using biofuels is in almost every aspect a mistake.

I partially agree with what you said about making them pay their environmental externalities, but we have to consider the costs of economical turmoil: coal is dirty and massive and aviation fuel is less dirty and medium scale; but aviation fuel stand heavier taxation than coal for electricity because the first is complementary to another more expensive good which is travelling with a purpose.

But we shouldn't fall in the common mistake of analysing every "environmental" tax -if such a thing exists- independently. And taxation is by far not the only way of dealing vigorously with climate change causes. Denialists master the art of severing units of information to imagine a storm in a glass of water and to imagine quietude in a still of a hurricane. They do it with climate science and certainly they do and will do it with any individual solution that should be proposed, so let not give them grist to their mill.

 

[macdoc]

But how do you dispose of the CO2 generated by an airline flight? You can't. IMO, a carbon tax is instead intended to build the hidden, external costs

you cannot dispose but you can offset. There ARE legit offsets. As long as it's carbon neutral it doesn't matter how you get to that point. It's scammy as hell but so are stock markets. Needs more oversight with teeth as is usual.

 

[CapelDodger]

While every man-made contribution to atmospheric CO2 is part of the problem, air travel is by no means as much of the problem as many assume it to be.

No doubt; my interest is in what the fate of the now-suspended unilateral charge reveals about current political and diplomatic reality. Europe is not going to be a global leader on anything again (or at least not for a long time; China and India are making a comeback so perhaps Europe will one day).

Europe may well clean up its own act and deal relatively well with what's coming, but it's influence on events (diplomatic or physical) will be slight. North America, China and India will effectively determine the policies that in turn determine the final outcome. The best we can do is hunker down and sit it out, in my opinion.

 

[macdoc]

Yeah - coping seems the approach. One reason I have property up the coastal range in Kuranda Tropical Australia.
The temperature increases will be be less int he tropics and it's already wet there and wetter won't be a problem.

I do however think that the Nordic nations can and are a model for a lower carbon industrial civilization and solar may put the south on a sustainable basis.

China, Australia other than tropical and the US in particular are in for a very hard series of changes in the this century.

Canada and Russia will have some benefit but no doubt we have now transitioned out of the Holocene into a much more erratic regime of the Anthropocene.

 

[Lennart Hyland]

I had a discussion on a swedish forum about GWs inpact on storms and hurricanes. We discussed how the warming of the oceans feeds new and more energetic hurricanes such as Sandy.

On a famous swedish metrology website they also discuss this matter. They mentioned that this ocean warming could led to less difference between cold and warm air masses which could counter this feeding process of storms.

What do you guys think of that?

 

[jimbob]

I had a discussion on a swedish forum about GWs inpact on storms and hurricanes. We discussed how the warming of the oceans feeds new and more energetic hurricanes such as Sandy.

On a famous swedish metrology website they also discuss this matter. They mentioned that this ocean warming could led to less difference between cold and warm air masses which could counter this feeding process of storms.

What do you guys think of that?

There are a shedload of positive and negative feedback mechanisms.

Trying to assess what are going to dominate in particular situations is complex. If it were otherwise, you wouldn't need computer models.

We can make very general statements, for example more energy is getting trapped in the lower atmosphere, and the global surface temperature will rise. In the extreme case, of course that is probably true - I don't think there is much variation of temperature with latitude on Venus, for example.

 

[aleCcowaN]

[Check it, as it looks you sent Mr Hyland into history 40 years earlier]

Well, the main factor continue to be the temperature of the sea in the regions where hurricanes generate, and that is going up, but slowly, though cyclical variation can provide up to a decade of -just relative- apparent calm. That is why there are no hurricanes in the Southern Hemisphere -except the first one in history, Cyclone Catarina, in 2004-. But in the same way hurricanes made their début in the Southern Hemisphere, hurricanes have an slight increasing decadal trend in the Northern Atlantic.

Be alert as denialists tend to use 10-15 years period for "long term" trends carefully selected to show what they want. They also use moving averages adapted to avoid including unfavourable events.

Also as an effect of global warming there are an increasing number of events involving a high pressure creating blockages. This makes the hurricanes to move slowly near coastal zones what increments the size of surges. If Sandy is an example of something, that'd be it.

Look this subject up in SkepticalScience. You can point to the fact that cyclone activity in medium and high latitudes is clearly increasing, as the "less difference" in lower latitudes becomes a more abrupt thermal gradient in higher ones.

 

[macdoc]

I think it's given that there may not be more cyclonic storms..there could even be fewer in the Atlantic basin due to wind shear changes.
Certainly the trend has been recently for more of the high end storms as a percentage of the mix which makes sense with a better grade of fuel.

The missing factor tho is intensity in terms of size and rainfall - which Sandy demonstrated - just a Cat 1 but big and moving relatively slowly and with lots of rain aboard.

Warmer planet has higher moisture loads and since the earth is still tilted there is ample temp gradients to dump it out as increased rain or snow.

The jet stream also impacts on storm power and range tho I'm not certain how the energy flow works.

 

[macdoc]

 

[balrog666]

[Check it, as it looks you sent Mr Hyland into history 40 years earlier]

Well, the main factor continue to be the temperature of the sea in the regions where hurricanes generate, and that is going up, but slowly, though cyclical variation can provide up to a decade of -just relative- apparent calm. That is why there are no hurricanes in the Southern Hemisphere -except the first one in history, Cyclone Catarina, in 2004-. But in the same way hurricanes made their début in the Southern Hemisphere, hurricanes have an slight increasing decadal trend in the Northern Atlantic.

Be alert as denialists tend to use 10-15 years period for "long term" trends carefully selected to show what they want. They also use moving averages adapted to avoid including unfavourable events.

Also as an effect of global warming there are an increasing number of events involving a high pressure creating blockages. This makes the hurricanes to move slowly near coastal zones what increments the size of surges. If Sandy is an example of something, that'd be it.

Look this subject up in SkepticalScience. You can point to the fact that cyclone activity in medium and high latitudes is clearly increasing, as the "less difference" in lower latitudes becomes a more abrupt thermal gradient in higher ones.

Except that that there has been no rise in sea temperatures beyond the noise floor.