A BBC story on the new study, “The spatial and temporal evolution of Pine Island Glacier thinning, 1995 – 2006,” (subs. req’d) explains:

Calculations based on the rate of melting 15 years ago had suggested the glacier would last for 600 years. But the new data points to a lifespan for the vast ice stream of only another 100 years.

The rate of loss is fastest in the centre of the glacier and the concern is that if the process continues, the glacier may break up and start to affect the ice sheet further inland.

One of the authors, Professor Andrew Shepherd of Leeds University, said that the melting from the centre of the glacier would add about 3cm to global sea level.

“But the ice trapped behind it is about 20-30cm of sea level rise and as soon as we destabilise or remove the middle of the glacier we don’t know really know what’s going to happen to the ice behind it,” he told BBC News.

When we last left Antarctic research, it turned out that the great ice sheet’s temperature had risen by up to about 3°C (5.4 °F) in the past 50 years, which is the fastest increase in the southern hemisphere (see “Antarctica has warmed significantly over past 50 years, revisited“):

Antarctica is disintegrating much faster than almost anybody imagined.  In 2001, the IPCC “consensus” said neither Greenland nor Antarctica would lose significant mass by 2100. They both already are.  As Penn State climatologist Richard Alley said in March 2006, the ice sheets appear to be shrinking “100 years ahead of schedule.”

Read more

On Monday, Refugees International (RI) announced the establishment of a new center to address “the needs of the tens of millions of people expected to be displaced by climate change.” Kenneth Bacon, RI’s president, and his wife Darcy have provided the seed money for the Ken and Darcy Bacon Center for the Study of Climate Displacement, with additional support from the UN Foundation and the Refugees International board. In its press release announcing the center, Refugees International explains the growing climate refugee crisis:

The most immediate threats from climate change are in the form of storms of increasing intensity, such as Cyclone Nargis in Burma; greater incidence of drought and floods that make traditional livelihoods unsustainable; and increased conflicts over access to limited resources. The war in Darfur derives, in part, from conflict over scarce resources as the desert expands. Other dramatic impacts are also predicted in the long term, such as the disappearance of island states like the Maldives. Estimates of the numbers of people expected to be displaced by climate change range from 50 million to 1 billion over the next 50 years. By comparison, there are currently 41.2 million people displaced by conflict.

Ken Bacon’s gift to the future comes at a tragic moment in his life. As he discussed in an op-ed in the Washington Post calling for health care reform, he has life-threatening brain cancer. Ken’s choice to establish this center in a time of personal crisis is a tribute to his integrity and passion for the world he has spent his life making a better place. “The most voiceless people in the world are probably refugees,” Nick Kristof writes, “and for the last decade one the great spokesmen for them has been Kenneth Bacon, the head of Refugees International.”

Fast on the heels of the second hottest June on record, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies reports that July is also the second hottest on record.

NASA just quietly updates its data set (here).  NASS GISS is much more low-key than NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, which issues a major report on the climate every month (see NCDC: Second hottest June on record “” and once El Nino really kicks in, expect global temperatures “to threaten previous record highs”).  I’ll wait for that report (out in a few days) for a longer discussion of July.

What I think is interesting about the NASA month-by-month data is that you can compare it to El Ni±o-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) data and see that it typically takes 3 to 6 months before an El Ni±o seriously starts warming up the whole planet (see page 24 here).  So we have a ways to go before we see the full effect of this El Ni±o.

Still it’s interesting that the NCDC reported that the ocean temperature in June was the warmest on record — a full 0.11°F warmer than the 2005 record.  This certainly looks to be the new El Ni±o on top of the long-term warming trend.  If indeed this is a moderate to strong El Ni±o, then it looks like we will be seeing record global temperatures this year or next, as NASA predicted back in January (see here).

Related Post:  Must-read NOAA paper smacks down the deniers: Q: “Is there any question that surface temperatures in the United States have been rising rapidly during the last 50 years?” A: “None at all.”

This Reuters story is a good follow up to last week’s CP post, “China softens climate rhetoric, commits to emissions peak (again), shows flexibility on Western reductions“:

China signals long-term plans to curb greenhouse gases

China will make “controlling greenhouse gas emissions” an important part of its development plans, the government said, as pressure on the world’s top emitter grows ahead of global talks on tackling climate change.

The broad intentions set down in a report from a cabinet meeting on Wednesday were made public as Beijing proceeds with negotiations seeking a new global pact to fight climate change.

The meeting, chaired by Premier Wen Jiabao, bluntly said global warming threatened China’s environmental and economic health, newspapers reported on Thursday.

Warning of worsening droughts and floods and melting glaciers, the meeting stressed the “urgency” of tackling climate change and called for domestic objectives to control greenhouse emissions, though it made no mention of emissions cuts.

“Make objectives for controlling greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to climate change an important basis for setting the medium and long-term development strategies and plans of government at every level,” the Xinhua news agency said in a summary of the cabinet meeting….

China’s climate change ambassador, Yu Qingtai, said recently that his country wanted to see output of carbon dioxide peak as soon as possible, a shift away from China’s right to pollute as it develops.

The cabinet warned baldly of dire consequences from warming.

“The large amount of greenhouse gases emitted through human activities is the main reason for global warming leading to extreme weather events,” the report on the meeting said. This, it said, was also “threatening the security of water supplies.”

And this Bloomberg story is a good follow up to “China begins transition to a clean-energy economy“:

Beijing to Triple Use of Renewable Energy by 2010

Read more

The Nature news story (subs. req’d) whose subhead I quoted above:

Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park and the study’s lead author, says that the results suggest that the annual number of hurricanes will continue to increase as a result of global warming….

Mann says that if sea surface temperatures continue to rise as a result of global warming, the world can expect to see more hurricanes….

Chris Landsea, a hurricane researcher at the National Hurricane Centre in Miami, Florida, says that other research has shown that 3 or 4 hurricanes were missed in annual counts from the late nineteenth century. This would “nullify” the peak in activity seen over the past ten years, he says.

But Mann says that the statistical model used in his study takes into account the possibility that historical hurricane counts could have been inaccurate, yet the results still show a peak in activity over the past decade.

Here is the study itself:  “Atlantic hurricanes and climate over the past 1,500 years” (subs. req’d).

For a key 2008 study, see “Nature: Hurricanes ARE getting fiercer “” and it’s going to get much worse.  As Nature explained last year:

“¦ scientists have come up with the firmest evidence so far that global warming will significantly increase the intensity of the most extreme storms worldwide.

That study means we face four more potential city-destroying super-hurricanes per year by mid-century.

Here is the NYT spin in this study and another one:

Read more

Certainly if Obama’s economic policies were not working, it would be all that opponents of climate and clean energy legislation would be talking about it.  But it would appear those policies — and the Feds — are, as the NYT reports in its lead story:

Almost exactly two years after it embarked on what was the biggest financial rescue in American history, the Federal Reserve said on Wednesday that the recession is ending and that it would take a step back toward normal policy.

Though the central bank stopped well short of declaring victory, policy makers issued their most upbeat assessment in more than a year by saying that the downturn appears to have hit bottom and that consumer spending, financial markets and inventory-building by corporations all continued to stabilize.

“Economic activity is leveling out,” the Fed’s policy-making committee said Wednesday after a two-day meeting, adding that inflation would remain “subdued for some time.”

Again, it may not be fair, but the likelihood of climate legislation passing the Senate depends critically on such seemingly unrelated matters as whether the Senate can pass health care reform and what the state of the economy  in November or January or whenever they vote on bill (see “Unemployment rate drops for first time in 15 months“).

Read more

Previous posts in this series (see links below) have focused on how the unconventional natural gas opportunity changes the game for low-cost climate action.  This post, by former Senator Tim Wirth and CAP CEO John Podesta, first published here, offers a variety of proposals for tapping this new resource in an environmentally responsible manner.

Summary

Natural gas is the cleanest fossil fuel””it produces less than half as much carbon pollution as coal. Recent technology advancements make affordable the development of unconventional natural gas resources. This creates an unprecedented opportunity to use gas as a bridge fuel to a 21st-century energy economy that relies on efficiency, renewable sources, and low-carbon fossil fuels such as natural gas.

Despite the potential energy, economic, and security benefits of natural gas, the recently House-passed American Clean Energy and Security Act, H.R. 2454, does not include enough opportunities to expand its use. The Center for American Progress and the Energy Future Coalition therefore propose a number of policies that would increase the use of natural gas and low-carbon energy sources while providing additional protection for our climate and communities.

Read more