Ohio State News Release

An unusually hot melting season in 2010 accelerated ice loss in southern Greenland by 100 billion tons – and large portions of the island’s bedrock rose an additional quarter of an inch in response.

That’s the finding from a network of nearly 50 GPS stations planted along the Greenland coast to measure the bedrock’s natural response to the ever-diminishing weight of ice above it.

Every year as the Greenland Ice Sheet melts, the rocky coast rises, explained Michael Bevis, Ohio Eminent Scholar in Geodynamics and professor in the School of Earth Sciences at Ohio State University.  Some GPS stations around Greenland routinely detect uplift of 15 mm (0.59 inches) or more, year after year. But a temperature spike in 2010 lifted the bedrock a detectably higher amount over a short five-month period – as high as 20 mm (0.79 inches) in some locations.

In a presentation Friday at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, Bevis described the study’s implications for climate change.

“Pulses of extra melting and uplift imply that we’ll experience pulses of extra sea level rise,” he said. “The process is not really a steady process.”

Because the solid earth is elastic, Bevis and his team can use the natural flexure of the Greenland bedrock to measure the weight of the ice sheet, just like the compression of a spring in a bathroom scale measures the weight of the person standing on it.

Read more

We don’t get to marry Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie.   We’re not going to be as successful as Oprah Winfrey or Steve Jobs.

So we generally grade ourselves on the basis of what we think was plausibly achievable, not what is theoretically possible.

On that basis, the Durban Agreement or Durban Platform (details here) was a pretty big success, committing the entire world — not just rich countries — to develop a roadmap for reductions, along with a serious Green Climate Fund.  It’s worth noting that the alternative was not a binding agreement to stabilize at 2°C ( 3.6°F) warming, but a complete collapse of the international negotiating process.

On the other hand, from the perspective of what is needed to avert catastrophic climate change, the agreement was, sadly, lacking.  As noted earlier, Climate Action Tracker analyzed the impact of the frameworks agreed upon at COP17:

The agreement in Durban to establish a new body to negotiate a global agreement (Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action) by 2015 represents a major step forward. The Climate Action Tracker scientists stated, however, that the agreement will not immediately affect the emissions outlook for 2020 and has postponed decisions on further emission reductions. They warned that catching up on this postponed action will be increasingly costly.

The Climate Action Tracker estimates that global mean warming would reach about 3.5°C by 2100 with the current reduction proposals on the table. They are definitely insufficient to limit temperature increase to 2°C.

Recent science suggests that if you go substantially above the 2C target (450 ppm), it becomes increasingly hard to stop at some intermediate level of warming, like 3.5C (600 ppm of CO2) because of the carbon-cycle feedbacks (see “Nature: Climate Experts Warn Thawing Permafrost Could Cause 2.5 Times the Warming of Deforestation!” and links therein).  And you probably lose the Greenland ice sheet, albeit over a long time (see New study of Greenland under “more realistic forcings” concludes “collapse of the ice-sheet was found to occur between 400 and 560 ppm”).  And you likely turn large parts of the arable and habited land of the world — including the U.S. Southwest — into dust-bowls, with devastating consequences for our ability to feed 9 billion people by midcentury.

And let’s remember what the formerly staid International Energy Agency reported last month about delaying action until 2020:

Delaying action is a false economy: for every $1 of investment in cleaner technology that is avoided in the power sector before 2020, an additional $4.30 would need to be spent after 2020 to compensate for the increased emissions.”

Of course, you can make the argument that no target-based deal was possible because the U.S. simply can’t commit to one, primarily because of the fatal decision by U.S. conservatives to embrace climate science denial and demagogue all climate action.  But that table scrap won’t feed anybody in the year 2040.

That said, we needed to get China onboard an international climate regime to ever have a shot of getting a climate deal that would pass muster in the United States.

I’m very interested in your thoughts on the agreement.

Here’s what Center for American Progress Chair John Podesta and CAP Senior Fellow Andrew Light (who was in Durban) had to say:

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE OR COMMENT

Read more

The public is being kept in the dark about the viability of solar photovoltaic energy, according to a study conducted at Queen’s University.

“Many analysts project a higher cost for solar photovoltaic energy because they don’t consider recent technological advancements and price reductions,” says [co-author] Joshua Pearce, Adjunct Professor, Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering. “Older models for determining solar photovoltaic energy costs are too conservative.”

Dr. Pearce believes solar photovoltaic systems are near the “tipping point” where they can produce energy for about the same price other traditional sources of energy.

That’s the news release for a new journal article, “A review of solar photovoltaic levelized cost of electricity” (subs. req’d).  The analysis concludes:

Given the state of the art in the technology and favourable financing terms it is clear that PV has already obtained grid parity in specific locations and as installed costs continue to decline, grid electricity prices continue to escalate, and industry experience increases, PV will become an increasingly economically advantageous source of electricity over expanding geographical regions.

That argument is one Climate Progress and others have been making for a while (see ‘Ferocious Cost Reductions’ Make Solar PV Competitive and Utility CEO on Solar: In “3 to 5 Years You’ll Be Able to Get Power Cheaper from the Roof of Your House Than From the Grid”.)

Here’s more for the news release (plus some more must-have CP charts):

Read more

A host of data – from sediment cores to ongoing drought in East Africa to computer models – point to one conclusion:

Our increasingly hotter, drier planet is going to be a tough place to farm.

Douglas Fischer, in a Daily Climate repost

SAN FRANCISCO – To get a glimpse of the future, look to East Africa today.

The Horn of Africa is in the midst of its worst drought in 60 years: Crop failures have left up to 10 million at risk of famine; social order has broken down in Somalia, with thousands of refugees streaming into Kenya; British Aid alone is feeding 2.4 million people across the region.

That’s a taste of what’s to come, say scientists mapping the impact of a warming planet on agriculture and civilization.

Read more