Tag Archives: celsius

New study: Antarctica’s tipping point is closer than we thought.

Antarctic ice sheets have been melting rapidly for hundreds of years, much longer than scientists previously thought, according to a study out Thursday. The findings suggest that estimates for global sea-level rise need to be reworked and that we’re even closer to the day that fish start chasing each other through New York City’s subway tunnels.

The scientists behind the new study in Scientific Reports were able to reconstruct a 6,250-year record of how fast Antarctic glaciers slipped into the sea. They did this by drilling the bottom of the Southern Ocean between Antarctica and Tierra del Fuego and analyzing the layers of mud they pulled up.

The story this mud tells between 4300 B.C. and 300 A.D. is uneventful. But around 1400, the skeletons of diatoms — ubiquitous, jewel-like sea creatures often used for dating ocean sediments — suggest that the weather became warmer. More oxygen isotopes that come from fresh (as opposed to saltwater) started showing up, meaning the glaciers were melting. Then around 1706, the ice began to melt even faster than before.

So natural climate change had cued up the massive Antarctic ice shelves to collapse before human-caused climate change turned up the heat. A random shift in wind patterns has been melting the ice caps for the last 300 years, the scientists wrote, “potentially predisposing them to collapse under intensified anthropogenic warming.”

The more glaciers melt, the more quickly they slide into the ocean. The more quickly ice that was previously suspended above the ocean slips into the water, the more quickly oceans rise and eels get into subway tunnels. This new paper didn’t lay out any new estimates for future sea level rise. But the implication is obvious. A previous study suggested that Antarctic melting alone would raise sea levels by the end of the century as much as 2.25 feet if temperatures increase by 4.5 degrees Celsius. Add that to ice melt from the northern ice caps and high tides are on track to be at least 3 feet higher worldwide by the end of the century, and maybe higher. This new finding suggests that might all happen sooner than later.

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New study: Antarctica’s tipping point is closer than we thought.

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The climate change ‘tipping point’ has already arrived for these 70 U.S. counties

For years now now, we’ve been hearing warnings about 2 degrees Celsius of warming — the global average cautioned against as part of the 2015 Paris accord. But according to a Washington Post interactive published on Tuesday, that so-called “tipping point” has already arrived in many towns across the country.

The earth is warming at an uneven rate. The Post looked at 100+ years of data from over 3,000 U.S counties and found that over 70 have already exceeded 2 degrees C of warming above pre-industrial levels. That translates to 34 million people (roughly 1 in 10 Americans) living in regions that are heating especially rapidly.

So where are the U.S. hot spots? The counties that have already reached 2 degrees C or warming are spread throughout the U.S., but there are some regional trends. The fastest-warming state in the country is Alaska, which may come as no surprise given its recent spate of heat waves and wildfires. In the Lower 48, Rhode Island’s average temperature increase is the first to pass 2 degrees Celsius, with other parts of the Northeast, including New Jersey, Connecticut, Maine, and Massachusetts, not far behind.

While the east coast has been sizzling this summer, the Post found that most regional increases were driven by warming winter temperatures, not summer heat waves. That’s means lakes can’t freeze (causing algae blooms, in some cases) and pests don’t die as per usual in certain historically cold regions. Less snow and ice also means those regions are less able to reflect solar radiation during winter, further feeding into the warming cycle.

The freezing point “is the most critical threshold among all temperatures,” David A. Robinson, New Jersey state climatologist and professor at Rutgers University’s department of geography, told the Post.

Scientists aren’t yet sure why the Northeast is warming so quickly. But experts say these 2-degree C hotspots are like little pieces of the future here in the present, showing us what’s coming.

Of course, climate catastrophes aren’t just about higher average regional temperatures. Cold, heat, flood, drought, and sea-level rise all pose significant risks to U.S. communities, according to a newly released analysis by the group Clever Real Estate. And bad news: The report found that many of the cities most at risk to the impacts of climate change are also the least prepared for it.

Clever Real Estate

There’s some concerning crossover between the Post’s list of rapidly warming counties and the areas identified by Clever Real Estate’s analysis (which was compiled by Eylul Tekin, a Ph.D. candidate at Washington University in St. Louis’ Memory Lab). Four of the top five cities with the “lowest degree of readiness” are located in Southern California (Anaheim, San Bernardino, Santa Ana, and Riverside). The counties in question have reached between 1.8 degrees C and 2.1 degrees C of warming compared to pre-industrial levels.

Parts of New Jersey also didn’t fare well on either list. Essex County has already hit the 2 degrees C warming mark, and Newark snagged the fifth spot on the list of places with the “largest difference between risk and readiness scores.”

So in short, there’s already a lot to sweat in many parts of the U.S. (which is even more reason to take climate action now). To get a better sense of the way your specific area is being affected, check out the two studies we mentioned here and here.

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The climate change ‘tipping point’ has already arrived for these 70 U.S. counties

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Best climate scenario is still too hot for many communities of color

It’s no surprise that the U.N.’s new major climate report has a lot to say about heat. But as average global temperatures continue to rise, certain communities are more at risk of getting burned than others.

Extreme heat already kills more people in the United States than any other weather event, including hurricanes or flooding. And when it strikes, urban low-income and communities of color often pay the highest price.

To paint a picture of how serious this is, we’ll need to get into some numbers. Scientists say that if we want to prevent the most catastrophic effects of climate change, we have to stop the world from reaching 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2030. This is a hard number to hit, considering we’re currently on track to reach 3.4 Celsius by the end of the century. But even if we succeed, that moderate rate of warming would still lead to 38,000 more heat-related deaths each year compared to rates from the 1960s to 1990s.

Just how much heat mortality rates rise will depend on additional factors, including the vulnerability of specific populations, the built environment, and whether or not people have access to air conditioning. Older people, children, and people with pre-existing conditions are the most vulnerable to the heat. It can trigger asthma attacks and other complications as the body struggles to cool itself.

“You have more emergency room visits, more doctor visits, it’s just bad all around,” says Afif El-Hasan, a pediatrician and national spokesperson for the American Lung Association.

El-Hasan, who also serves on the Environmental Justice Advisory Group at the Southern California Air Quality Management District, says some of his low-income patients keep their windows open in lieu of air conditioning, inadvertently increasing their exposure to nearby sources of air pollution. Those pollutants can end up damaging their lungs, making them even more vulnerable to heat waves. The changing climate, coupled with socioeconomic inequities, trigger an avalanche of health risks, El-Hasan says. “Everything just cascades on top of each other and becomes a bigger problem than it might have otherwise been.”

Like real estate, heat vulnerability is very much about location. Not only are neighborhoods that border freeways more polluted, but they’re also actually hotter too. Plants and trees help cool the air, while dark pavement traps heat. As a result, places with more concrete and less green — often low-income, black and brown neighborhoods where there’s been a history of redlining or disinvestment — are several degrees warmer than their typically more affluent neighbors. It’s called the urban heat island effect, and in places like New York City, its consequences are stark. On average, 100 people die each year in the city — half of them African Americans, even though they only make up a quarter of the population.

“It’s becoming unlivable in urban cities,” says Cynthia Herrera, Environmental Policy and Advocacy Coordinator at WE ACT for Environmental Justice, a community-based organization in Harlem. Over the summer, her organization tracked the number of weather advisories in the hopes of gathering information to help the community adapt to a warming climate. They recorded four heat waves this past summer — a number that’s likely to rise but already feels overwhelming to residents.

“Even if we just stay the same and have four heat waves every summer for the next 10 years we’re not prepared,” she said.

Heat-related deaths are entirely preventable, and there are still ways for communities to adapt — like greening cities and making sure people have places to cool down. Kim Knowlton, senior scientist and deputy director at the National Resources Defence Council, has hope that the U.N. report will be a wake-up call.

“The science about this has to do with everyone,” Knowlton says. “I hope that people start to demand protections for themselves.”

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Best climate scenario is still too hot for many communities of color

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Police in India kill four people protesting state-run coal mine.

According to a paper released Tuesday by James Hansen, formerly of NASA and now at Columbia University*, the landmark Paris Agreement is solid C-minus work — but when it comes to climate commitments, mediocrity is criminal. Slacker countries making only modest emissions reductions will lock future generations into dangerous levels of climate change.

The average global temperature is already 1 to 1.3 degrees Celsius warmer than preindustrial levels, according to Hansen’s group. That’s on par with the Earth’s climate 115,000 years ago, when the seas were 20 feet higher than they are today.

Unless we phase out fossil fuels entirely in the next few years, Hansen told reporters on Monday, future generations will have to achieve “negative emissions” by actively removing carbon from the atmosphere. Seeing as we don’t even know if that’s possible, that’d be a helluva task for our progeny.

Hansen and his coauthors’ work, which is undergoing peer review, supports a lawsuit brought by 21 young people against the U.S. government. It charges our lawmakers with not protecting the “life, liberty, and property” of future citizens by allowing fossil fuel interests to keep polluting.

But a solution is possible, Hansen explained, if we commit to a fee on carbon pollution and more investment in renewable energy.

*Correction: This story originally referred to Hansen as a former NASA director. He was director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

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Police in India kill four people protesting state-run coal mine.

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For the first time, bees have been added to the U.S. endangered species list.

According to a paper released Tuesday by James Hansen, formerly of NASA and now at Columbia University*, the landmark Paris Agreement is solid C-minus work — but when it comes to climate commitments, mediocrity is criminal. Slacker countries making only modest emissions reductions will lock future generations into dangerous levels of climate change.

The average global temperature is already 1 to 1.3 degrees Celsius warmer than preindustrial levels, according to Hansen’s group. That’s on par with the Earth’s climate 115,000 years ago, when the seas were 20 feet higher than they are today.

Unless we phase out fossil fuels entirely in the next few years, Hansen told reporters on Monday, future generations will have to achieve “negative emissions” by actively removing carbon from the atmosphere. Seeing as we don’t even know if that’s possible, that’d be a helluva task for our progeny.

Hansen and his coauthors’ work, which is undergoing peer review, supports a lawsuit brought by 21 young people against the U.S. government. It charges our lawmakers with not protecting the “life, liberty, and property” of future citizens by allowing fossil fuel interests to keep polluting.

But a solution is possible, Hansen explained, if we commit to a fee on carbon pollution and more investment in renewable energy.

*Correction: This story originally referred to Hansen as a former NASA director. He was director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

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For the first time, bees have been added to the U.S. endangered species list.

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One city is making a good start at tackling its homelessness problems — thanks to a lawsuit.

What could go wrong?

The Stones field, 200 miles south of New Orleans and 1.8 miles beneath the water surface, is far deeper than the field tapped by the Deepwater Horizon rig, which exploded in 2010, killing 11 workers and spilling about 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

The new project, the Guardian reports, could be a boon to Shell CEO Ben van Beurden, whose annual bonus is linked to completing major new projects. But some Shell shareholders will be less than pleased. At the company’s annual meeting last year, many shareholders pushed to end CEO bonuses for actions that harm the climate and to require investments in renewables.

Last year, van Beurden admitted that we cannot burn all the fossil fuel reserves on the planet and expect global temperature rise to stay below 2 degrees Celsius. Above 2C, climate scientists warn that the consequences will be severe and, in some cases, irreversible. So far, we’re halfway there.

But Shell is just continuing on with business as usual: The company forecasts that its deep-water production capacity will grow dramatically by the early 2020s.

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One city is making a good start at tackling its homelessness problems — thanks to a lawsuit.

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Is it us or is it getting hotter in here?

What could go wrong?

The Stones field, 200 miles south of New Orleans and 1.8 miles beneath the water surface, is far deeper than the field tapped by the Deepwater Horizon rig, which exploded in 2010, killing 11 workers and spilling about 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

The new project, the Guardian reports, could be a boon to Shell CEO Ben van Beurden, whose annual bonus is linked to completing major new projects. But some Shell shareholders will be less than pleased. At the company’s annual meeting last year, many shareholders pushed to end CEO bonuses for actions that harm the climate and to require investments in renewables.

Last year, van Beurden admitted that we cannot burn all the fossil fuel reserves on the planet and expect global temperature rise to stay below 2 degrees Celsius. Above 2C, climate scientists warn that the consequences will be severe and, in some cases, irreversible. So far, we’re halfway there.

But Shell is just continuing on with business as usual: The company forecasts that its deep-water production capacity will grow dramatically by the early 2020s.

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Is it us or is it getting hotter in here?

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Tiny sea creatures are saving us from hell on earth. So why are we endangering them?

Tiny sea creatures are saving us from hell on earth. So why are we endangering them?

By on Jun 6, 2016Share

Deep in the ocean where the sun don’t shine, fissures in the earth’s crust spew super-heated geothermal water and gases of up to 400 degrees Celsius.

Sounds like hell? Not quite — hydrothermal vents discovered just 40 years ago by scientists, teem with a surprising abundance of life. And these hotbeds of biodiversity are crucial for underwater ecosystems and the global climate, according to a recent report in Frontiers In Marine Science.

The vents dot the sea floor at depths of 5,000 to 13,000 feet, gushing sulfides, methane, iron, and hydrogen into the ocean. Like moths to a (very hot) flame, microorganisms around the vents convert these elements into food. They are, in turn, eaten by other organisms, transporting that geothermal energy up a food chain that includes mussels, clams, giant crabs, and those truly bizarre scarlet tube worm colonies.

Importantly, researchers found that vent-dwelling creatures gobble up as much as 90 percent of the released methane — which, if it were to be released into the atmosphere, would act as a greenhouse gas 86 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period.

“There is more methane on the ocean floor than there are other forms of fossil fuels left in the oceans,” said Andrew Thurber, coauthor on the report, “and if it were all released it would be a doomsday climatic event. Through methane consumption, these life forms are literally saving the planet.”

But before you can say “OMG tube worm!”, there’s more. These extreme ecosystems are threatened by offshore oil and gas extraction — particularly the peripheral impacts like, anchors, noise pollution, leakage. Big plans are brewing to mine the vents for copper, gold, or silver, with the first deep-sea mining machines set for a test drive in the near future.

Since the vents are dispersed around the ocean floor around the world, any coordinated plan to protect them would require international cooperation. Since losing them might spell disaster — not to get too fire and brimstone-y on you guys — it’s as good a reason as any to work together.

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Tiny sea creatures are saving us from hell on earth. So why are we endangering them?

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Obama: Paris Climate Agreement Could Be a "Turning Point For the World"

Mother Jones

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More than seven years ago, Barack Obama told campaign supporters that one day, Americans would be able to tell their children that “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

Saturday* evening—just hours after international leaders agreed to a historic deal to fight global warming—Obama told the nation that the accord could represent “a turning point for the world” and would help humanity “delay or avoid some of the worst consequences of climate change.”

“We may not live to see the full realization of our achievement, but that’s OK,” Obama said. “What matters is that today we can be more confident that this planet will be in better shape for the next generation.” You can watch Obama’s remarks above.

The deal, known as the Paris Agreement, includes commitments from countries around the world to reduce their emissions and pledges from high-polluting, developed nations help help poorer countries transition to clean energy and adapt to climate change. You can read more about the details of the agreement here.

Obama portrayed the hard-won deal as a product of American leadership. He said that the joint plan to control emissions that he and China’s President Xi Jinping announced last year inspired other countries to make ambitious climate commitments. “Over the past seven years,” Obama said, “we’ve transformed the United States into the global leader in fighting climate change.”

Obama also took a shot at his Republican critics, who have bitterly opposed his regulations on power plant emission and his other climate policies. “Skeptics said these actions would kill jobs,” said Obama. “Instead, we’ve seen the longest streak of private-sector job creation in our history.”

Still, Obama acknowledged that the Paris Agreement is far from sufficient to end the dangers posed by climate change. Negotiators pledged to limit warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. They also agreed and to “pursue efforts” to limit the increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

However, all of the emissions cuts promised by countries thus far won’t come anywhere close to meeting those goals. Scientists estimate that these commitments would put the planet on course for 2.7 degrees Celsius of warming—and that’s only if countries actually follow through on them.

“The problem’s not solved because of this accord,” said Obama. “But make no mistake, the Paris Agreement establishes the enduring framework the world needs to solve the climate crisis.”

* Day corrected

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Obama: Paris Climate Agreement Could Be a "Turning Point For the World"

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America Uses Fahrenheit. The Rest of the World Uses Celsius. America Is Right. The Rest of the World Is Wrong.

Mother Jones

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Vox has a post up called “Why Americans still use Fahrenheit long after everyone else switched to Celsius.” In it Zack Beauchamp sides with the standard line that America should jump on the Celsius train and leave Troglodyte Station.

The bizarre measurements commonly used in the US, including Fahrenheit, are bad for its scientific establishment, its kids, and probably its businesses.

Susannah Locke lays out the case for Celsius and the rest of the metric system very persuasively, but here’s a brief recap. The simpler metric scales make basic calculations easier and thus less error-prone. American companies incur extra costs by producing two sets of products, one for the US and one for the metric using world.

American parents and caregivers are more likely to screw up conversion rates when they give out medicine, sending some children, who are more susceptible to overdoses, to the hospital. Further, American students have to be trained on two sets of measurements, making basic science education even more difficult.

Going back to Jefferson there have been many movements to get the US to metricate. Lincoln Chaffee wants to get the US to adopt the metric system, too.

But I am a red-blooded American boy who likes listening to Tom Petty and riding motorcycles and wearing blue jeans and using Fahrenheit so Vox‘s post made me think of this great chart from the wonderful site isomorphismes which explains why our temperature measurement system is the best temperature measurement system.

“Fahrenheit uses its digits more efficiently than Centigrade” isomorphism

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America Uses Fahrenheit. The Rest of the World Uses Celsius. America Is Right. The Rest of the World Is Wrong.

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