Fleet Composite Squadron 6 conducts boat operations off coast of Naval Station Norfolk, VA. (Credit: U.S. Navy)

Yesterday Terry McAuliffe, Virginia’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate, revealed newfound support for oil and gas exploration off the Commonwealth’s coast. The Washington Post reported that he now backs legislation sponsored by Virginia’s Democratic U.S. Senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine that would open offshore areas to oil and gas exploration.

Offshore oil drilling is viewed by Virginia politicians on both sides of the aisle as a budgetary panacea, in part because of the economic activity drilling would create, but perhaps more so because the Warner-Kaine bill would direct a portion of drilling royalties back into the commonwealth’s coffers. But the bottom line is that any development carries with it massive risk to the state’s environment and the current economic drivers that rely on healthy and accessible oceans and coasts.

A recent PricewaterhouseCoopers analysis of Virginia’s tourism industry reported that the sector supports more than 200,000 jobs, yielding an economic impact of more than $20 billion in 2011, and that Virginia’s beaches alone attracted nearly 10 percent of the state’s tourists. Virginia’s coast and ocean also support thriving fisheries; in 2011 fishermen landed 247,000 tons of seafood in Virginia, worth more than $191 million, ranking it the third largest seafood producer in the country by weight.

As Gulf Coast states painfully learned in 2010’s Deepwater Horizon disaster, offshore drilling accidents can devastate robust tourism industries, the health of marine ecosystems, and both the productivity and the reputation of the marine fisheries supported by those ecosystems. Unfortunately, Congress has so far failed to pass any reforms to reduce the risk of spills or blowouts, meaning the few regulatory reforms made by the Department of the Interior to improve offshore drilling safety in the aftermath of the Gulf spill could be rolled back by a future administration.

Drilling offshore Virginia would also be incompatible with another vital activity carried out along the state’s coast — keeping our nation safe. Naval Station Norfolk, the largest naval complex in the world, is one of the state’s primary economic engines, supporting more than 71,000 military and civilian employees. Overall the Navy was responsible for more nearly $15 billion in economic impact in Virginia in fiscal year 2009.

In 2010 the US Department of Defense determined that 74 percent of the areas eyed for oil and gas leasing offshore Virginia would directly interfere with the extensive military activities that are carried out in the region, including ordnance training and aircraft carrier operations. As Virginia Representative James Moran put it, “When you come down to it, the Navy’s operations are much more important to the Virginia economy, let alone national security, than … drilling operations.”

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Shiva Polefka is a Research Associate for Ocean Policy at the Center for American Progress where Michael Conathan is the Director of Ocean Policy.

(Credit: Robert F. Bukaty, AP)

Fishing is a profession often passed down from one generation to the next. Many lobstermen in Maine fish the same bottom their fathers and grandfathers fished, and the same holds true of fishermen father offshore as well. Yet increasingly, anecdotal evidence has suggested that the old faithful fishing spots are no longer quite so reliable.

In northern regions these shifts could lead to conflicts over fishing rights and access to traditional fishing grounds. In the tropics, the problem could be more dire. As our oceans warm, species may not be able to adapt at all, leaving tropical oceans with severely depleted fish stocks and some of the most vulnerable human populations with a distinct shortage of a vital protein source.

Much of this scarcity of native species can be attributed to overfishing, a practice now largely halted in U.S. waters thanks to strict new science-based management tactics implemented as a result of a 2006 reauthorization of the law that governs our fisheries. But increasingly, both scientists and fishermen have been eying climate change as a reason some fish are showing up in new places and the catch fishermen are accustomed to finding have been surprisingly slow to rebuild.

A new study published this week in the journal Nature puts some peer-reviewed punch behind what up until now was a common-sense theory. Most fish have a preference for a certain water temperature range, and because they are mobile creatures, as water warms due to climate change, fish populations are on the move toward the poles. The study found:

Except in the tropics, catch composition in most ecosystems 
slowly changed to include more warm-water species and fewer cool-water species. In the tropics, the catch followed a similar pattern from 1970 to 1980 and then stabilized, likely because there are no species with high enough temperature preferences to replace those that declined. Statistical models showed that the increase in warm-water species was significantly related to increasing ocean temperatures.

This latest research builds on the authors’ 2009 study that stated:

…climate change may lead to large-scale redistribution of global catch potential, with an average of 30–70% increase in high-latitude regions and a drop of up to 40% in the tropics.

This trend could have dire implications for both fishermen and fish.

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Michael Conathan, Director of Ocean Policy at the Center for American Progress

Climate change is slamming the Arctic more severely than any other place on Earth. Yet tomorrow’s Arctic Council ministerial meeting in Kiruna, Sweden is not expected to produce substantial action to address it.

In short, glaciers are moving faster than efforts to slow them. Representatives from the eight Arctic nations, including US Secretary of State John Kerry, will gather to sign an oil spill preparedness and response agreement and vote on permanent observer status for other major nations with Arctic interests, including China and the EU. While the agenda includes presentations on ocean acidification and resilience, meaningful commitments to slow the devastating effects of climate change are unlikely.

Acknowledging the fact that climate change is occurring in the Arctic at double the rate of the rest of the planet, Gustaf Lind, Sweden’s top Arctic official, stated in a pre-meeting press conference that discussions regarding reductions in the CO2 emissions that fuel global warming should be reserved for the United Nations process.

However, CO2 reductions are not the only means of curbing climate change, and smaller forums like the Arctic Council offer a rare opportunity to reach agreements without needing 190 countries on board. The last ministerial meeting in 2011 highlighted the role of black carbon in climate change. Black carbon — essentially soot from inefficient combustion, such as natural gas flaring, wood stoves and the controlled burning of agricultural waste — is particularly dangerous in the Arctic, where it darkens ice surfaces and accelerates melting.

Black carbon and other short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs) are potent greenhouse gases that play a major role in driving global warming. However, new research from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography found that reducing SCLPs in conjunction with curbing carbon pollution could have a very powerful effect on mitigating climate change. Though the Council’s Task Force on SLCPs has produced a significant body of research and recommendations, no commitments from Arctic Council members to curb their emissions were made in 2011 and two years later, SLCPs are on the agenda once again but without a plan to reduce their destructive presence.

Unfortunately, time is not on the Council’s side. Last year was a very grim one for the Arctic, as record-low sea ice extent, record ice sheet surface melting in Greenland, record-high permafrost temperature, and record-low snow extent were all recorded.

Secretary Kerry has underscored the urgency of climate change in recent months, today offering “regret” that the US hasn’t done more to address the problem. A new Arctic management plan released by the White House on Friday, however, was little more than a restatement of the vague goals for the region drafted at the end of the Bush presidency. In addition to advocating responsible stewardship of the Arctic ecosystem, the plan called for development of offshore oil and gas resources as part of the administration’s “all of the above” strategy.

Offshore drilling in the Arctic comes with an enormous risk and cost due to the lack of infrastructure, oil spill response technology, baseline scientific knowledge, and preparedness to operate in the harsh and unpredictable conditions. Ironically, the dramatic changes experienced throughout the Arctic — many of which are the result of man-made climate change — are unlocking massive fossil-fuel reserves which, when burned, would only accelerate the destructive cycle of unchecked emissions and warming. Slowing the devastating steamroll of climate change requires slashing the amount of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere, not opening up vast new sources of carbon.

At a time when climate change should receive top billing at the Arctic Council ministerial, allowing another meeting to pass without a concerted effort to deal directly with the pollutants that are driving the dramatic changes in the Arctic is a serious missed opportunity.

Kiley Kroh is the Associate Director for Ocean Communications at the Center for American Progress. Rebecca Lefton, Senior Policy Analyst, contributed to this post.

Northeast Shelf Regions: Mid-Atlantic Bight (MAB), Southern New England (SNE), Georges Bank (GB) and Gulf of Maine (GOM)

A new “Ecosystem Advisory” from NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC) reports, “Sea surface temperatures in the Northeast Shelf Large Marine Ecosystem during 2012 were the highest recorded in 150 years.”

The Ecosystem extends from Cape Hatteras, N.C. to the Gulf of Maine. The temperature record is “based on both contemporary satellite remote-sensing data and long-term ship-board measurements.” In 2012, sea surface temperature (SST) for the region was nearly  3°F above the average for the past three decades:

The advisory reports on conditions in the second half of 2012.

Sea surface temperature for the Northeast Shelf Ecosystem reached a record high of 14 degrees Celsius (57.2°F) in 2012, exceeding the previous record high in 1951. Average SST has typically been lower than 12.4 C (54.3 F) over the past three decades.

… The temperature increase in 2012 was the highest jump in temperature seen in the time series and one of only five times temperature has changed by more than 1 C (1.8 F).

No doubt it was purely coincidental that six months ago, in the fall of 2012, the Northeast was hit by the “largest hurricane in Atlantic history measured by diameter of gale force winds (1,040mi).” Or not.

The fact is climate scientists have long predicted that about 90% of total human-made global warming would go into heating the oceans — and that’s precisely what’s been happening (see “Global Warming Has Accelerated In Past 15 Years, New Study Of Oceans Confirms“):

Land, atmosphere, and ice heating (red), 0-700 meter OHC increase (light blue), 700-2,000 meter OHC increase (dark blue).  From Nuccitelli et al. (2012).

But I guess we’ll need some storms even more destructive than frankenstorm Sandy before the nation wakes up to the reality that climate change is unfolding much as scientists had warned — and that means all but certain ruin for modern civilization if we don’t slash carbon pollution rapidly.

Related Posts:

• How Does Climate Change Make Superstorms Like Sandy More Destructive?
• How Arctic Ice Loss Amplified Superstorm Sandy — Oceanography Journal

By Shiva Polefka

Today, Saturday, April 20th, marks the third anniversary of the explosion aboard BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig that killed 11 workers and set off the largest accidental spill in the oil industry’s history. The ruptured Macondo well spewed nearly 5 million barrels of crude oil over the course of the summer, ultimately fouling more than 1,000 miles of Gulf of Mexico coastline and bringing the vast fishing and tourism industries of the region to a standstill, before the Macondo well was finally sealed and “killed” on September 19, 2010.

Following the Deepwater Horizon blowout, President Obama appointed a panel of experts that convened as the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling. Its final report, issued in January 2011, revealed the irresponsible practices of BP and its contractors, uncovered a lack of federal oversight, and provided a comprehensive set of policy reforms that would make the offshore energy industry safer.

Earlier this week, members of the Commission, now acting independently as a group called Oil Spill Commission Action (OSCA), released their second “Report Card” on the progress major actors were making to implement their recommendations.

So, three years after the catastrophe, what has changed? Have we acted on the painful lessons taught by Deepwater Horizon? Are government and industry leaders taking steps to reduce the risk of another destructive spill or blowout? The answers are decidedly mixed.

Department of the Interior and Industry

OSCA awarded the Obama administration a B, in recognition that the Department of the Interior has enacted some of the safety reforms recommended within the official report, and brought about a 15 percent increase in offshore rig inspections occurring in the Gulf.

OSCA gave the oil industry a B-, noting that it has voluntarily contributed in meaningful ways to the reduction of risk future oil spills in response to Deepwater Horizon, by implementing new safety standards and readying four oil well capping systems for the Gulf of Mexico like the one ultimately used to stanch the Macondo well’s blowout. Before Deepwater Horizon, no such systems existed.

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An antique windmill stands at the gated entrance to Oyster Harbors in Osterville, MA, the location of Bill Koch’s family compound. (Photo credit: Southeby’s International Realty Inc.)

Is there a literary trope that draws more universal ire than the spoiled brat? There can’t be a single person on the face of the planet who empathizes with the likes of Eric Cartman, Wonka golden ticket holder Veruca Salt, or any of the charming young heroines of MTV’s twisted reality show, “My Super Sweet 16.” So it is with the wealthiest and most outspoken opponent of the nation’s first proposed offshore wind farm.

In a lengthy interview in the spring issue of Massachusetts-based CommonWealth magazine, petroleum coke magnate Bill Koch went full on climate-denier and finally came clean about his long-standing opposition to the Cape Wind project. The reason he has spent millions of dollars to block the project comes down to one simple point: he doesn’t want to ruin the view from his Cape Cod waterfront estate.

In the interview, Koch called the project “visual pollution” and explained that he “was buying more property on the Cape for a family compound and the windmills would interfere with the aesthetics.”

Would this be a good point to mention that the symbol of Oyster Harbors, the gated community in which Koch’s Osterville compound is located, is actually a windmill?

While Cape Wind proponents have long assumed NIMBY-ism was at the root of Koch’s position, this is the first time he’s come out and admitted it so publicly, even actually saying the words, “I didn’t want it in my backyard.”

Unfortunately for Koch, he doesn’t have final say over the project, because the wind farm won’t actually be built in the backyard of his compound, though it will be (barely) visible from his veranda. This visual simulation shows what the turbines would look like from Cotuit, the town next to Koch’s.

Cape Wind’s simulation of the post-construction view from Cotuit, MA, 5.6 miles from the nearest edge of its proposed wind farm. (Simulation by Cape Wind, LLC.)

Clearly Koch believes this is a visual blight worth spending millions to prevent. As of 2006, Koch had donated at least $1.5 million to the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, an organization dedicated to stopping the Cape Wind project. Additionally, as of 2009 his corporation, OxBow Energy, was paying the $150,000 salary of the group’s executive director. And in the most recent interview, Koch said he had been supporting the group “more and more.”

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There’s a new study out (and unfortunately gated) from European researchers in Nature Climate Change adding to the case that the oceans have absorbed much of the effect of global warming since 2000.

One of the more popular recent arguments among climate change deniers is that temperatures have not increased since roughly 2000, even as we’ve continued dumping carbon emissions into the atmosphere. The claim falls apart in several different ways. But one of the main ones is that it simply fails to account for the fact that the oceans are themselves part of the planetary ecological system being affected by global warming. And as Reuters reported, one of the findings of the study is that surface temperatures could begin accelerating again if that heat moves back out of the oceans:

Experts in France and Spain said on Sunday that the oceans took up more warmth from the air around 2000. That would help explain the slowdown in surface warming but would also suggest that the pause may be only temporary and brief.

“Most of this excess energy was absorbed in the top 700 meters (2,300 ft) of the ocean at the onset of the warming pause, 65 percent of it in the tropical Pacific and Atlantic oceans,” they wrote in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Lead author Virginie Guemas of the Catalan Institute of Climate Sciences in Barcelona said the hidden heat may return to the atmosphere in the next decade, stoking warming again.
“If it is only related to natural variability then the rate of warming will increase soon,” she told Reuters.

Several previous studies, including Balmaseda et al. (2013) and Nuccitelli et al. (2012) used a combination of improved data collection and new computer modeling to reach essentially the same conclusion. Furthermore, they concluded that anywhere from 30 to 40 percent of the warming over the last ten or so years has occurred in the ocean depths below 700 meters — depths that aren’t always accounted for.

On top of that, there was an unusually high level of La Niña events since 2000, which also covered up some of the warming. La Niña and El Niño are the two poles of the Southern Oscillation, a natural cyclical process that brings cold and warm water, respectively, upwelling to the surface of the equatorial Pacific Ocean. The cold waters accompanying the La Niña oscillation in 2008 were the strongest seen since 1999, and drove sea-surface temperatures as much as two degrees colder than they otherwise would be.

The Southern Oscillation: A positive index corresponds to La Niña, and a negative one corresponds to El Niño.

All told, the oceanic temperature increase accounts for much of the “missing heat” — warming that was anticipated based on the scale of carbon emissions, but that standard measurements couldn’t pick up — identified by Kevin Trenberth, one of the authors of the previous studies. It also means that, again contrary to some claims, the Earth’s climate sensitivity probably isn’t lower than previously thought. More likely, we’ll simply see less short-term warming than scientists have anticipated, but offset by greater long-term warming and more rapid sea level rise.

“Global warming is continuing but it’s being manifested in somewhat different ways,” Trenberth told Reuters, adding that the pause in surface warming could last 15 to 20 years. Meanwhile, “recent warming rates of the waters below 700 meters appear to be unprecedented.”

You may recall a couple years ago the climate disinformers trumpeted the (very) short-term slowdown in sea level rise. We can hardly wait for their posts on the recent speed up — JR.

Figure 1: Mean sea level (in centimetres) since 1993 obtained by satellite altimetry observations. Annual and semi-annual signals have been removed to reveal the long-term trend. The glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) of 0.3mm per year is added to account for the slumping of ocean basins. Image from the AVISO website.

By Rob Painting, via Skeptical Science

The Earth is warming which is driving the ongoing thermal expansion of sea water and the melt of land-based ice. Both processes are raising sea level, but superimposed upon this long-term sea level rise are what scientists at NASA JPL (Jet Propulsion Lab) have coined, “potholes and speed bumps on the road to higher seas“. (See their follow-up paper – The 2011 La Niña: So strong, the oceans fell, Boening 2012).

Since mid-2011 a giant “speed bump” has been encountered. In roughly the last two years the global oceans have risen approximately 20 millimetres (mm), or 10 mm per year. This is over three times the rate of sea level rise during the time of satellite-based observations (currently 3.18 mm per year), from 1993 to the present.

So does this mean land-based ice is undergoing a remarkably abrupt period of disintegration? While possible, it’s probably not the reason for the giant speed bump.

Pot Holes and Speed Bumps
The largest contributor to the year-to-year (short-term) fluctuation in sea level is the temporary exchange of water mass between the land and ocean. This land-ocean exchange of water is coupled to the natural Pacific Ocean phenomenon called the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) – which affects weather on a global scale. (See Ngo-Duc 2005, Nerem 2010, Llovel 2011, Cazenave 2012 & Boening 2012 – linked to above):

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By Michael Conathan and Shiva Polefka, via the Center for American Progress

When President Barack Obama convenes his cabinet in the White House’s Roosevelt Room, one might be left with the impression that defenders of our oceans are rather pointedly underrepresented. The Department of Commerce, which oversees the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, has lacked a secretary since John Bryson resigned last summer. Former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta probably pulled double duty as Aquaman in the president’s Hall of Justice; prior to his service in the Obama administration, Secretary Panetta served as a congressman from Monterrey, California, and as head of the Pew Oceans Commission. But now he, too, has left the building, with a shout-out to his trusty sidekick, his dog Bravo.

President Obama is seeking to fill the open seat at Commerce, and to replace Jane Lubchenco, who stepped down last month as NOAA’s administrator. During this transition period, ocean advocates wondered whether domestic ocean issues would struggle even more than usual to find prominence in the West Wing. The problems facing our marine ecosystems and oceans are in serious need of solutions, and each day that passes without mention of these answers means another day of devastating blows to our waters. But a speech last week by Secretary of State John Kerry suggested that he might become the new standard bearer for ocean issues in the White House.

In his remarks, Secretary Kerry discussed a broad range of ocean issues, and the link between ocean health and greenhouse gas emissions was foremost among them. He said:

[I]t is clear that we have an enormous challenge ahead of us … energy policy that results in acidification, the bleaching of coral, the destruction of species, the change in the Arctic because of the ice melt … The entire system is interdependent, and we toy with that at our peril.

With a new blue warrior bringing ocean issues to arguably the most influential group of advisers on planet earth—or, as Kerry put it in his speech, “planet ocean” — let’s take a look at the top five ocean issues the secretary of state can use his position to influence.

Climate change

Secretary Kerry, who was a strong climate hawk as a senator, used pointed words to hammer home the critical need to take proactive steps to address the looming climate crisis. “The science is screaming at us … demanding that people in positions of public responsibility … at least understand what is happening and take steps to prevent potential disaster,” he said last week. These words echoed those that Secretary Kerry delivered in his first major foreign policy speech in February, in which he challenged Americans to “have the foresight and courage to make the investments necessary to safeguard the most sacred trust we keep for our children and grandchildren: an environment not ravaged by rising seas, deadly superstorms, devastating droughts, and the other hallmarks of a dramatically changing climate.”

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Argo buoy taking measurements. (Credit: Argo Project Office)

By Dana Nuccitelli via Skeptical Science.

A new study of ocean warming has just been published in Geophysical Research Letters by Balmaseda, Trenberth, and Källén (2013). There are several important conclusions which can be drawn from this paper.

• Completely contrary to the popular contrarian myth, global warming has accelerated, with more overall global warming in the past 15 years than the prior 15 years. This is because about 90% of overall global warming goes into heating the oceans, and the oceans have been warming dramatically.
• As suspected, much of the ‘missing heat’ Kevin Trenberth previously talked about has been found in the deep oceans. Consistent with the results of Nuccitelli et al. (2012), this study finds that 30% of the ocean warming over the past decade has occurred in the deeper oceans below 700 meters, which they note is unprecedented over at least the past half century.
• Some recent studies have concluded based on the slowed global surface warming over the past decade that the sensitivity of the climate to the increased greenhouse effect is somewhat lower than the IPCC best estimate. Those studies are fundamentally flawed because they do not account for the warming of the deep oceans.
• The slowed surface air warming over the past decade has lulled many people into a false and unwarranted sense of security.

The main results of the study are illustrated in its Figure 1.

Figure 1: Ocean Heat Content from 0 to 300 meters (grey), 700 m (blue), and total depth (violet) from ORAS4, as represented by its 5 ensemble members.

The Data

In this paper, the authors used ocean heat content data from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts’ Ocean Reanalysis System 4 (ORAS4). A ‘reanalysis’ is a climate or weather model simulation of the past that incorporates data from historical observations. In the case of ORAS4, this includes ocean temperature measurements from bathythermographs and the Argo buoys, and other types of data like sea level and surface temperatures. The ORAS4 data span from 1958 to the present, and have a high 1°x1° horizontal resolution, as well as 42 vertical layers. As the authors describe the data set,

ORAS4 has been produced by combining, every 10 days, the output of an ocean model forced by atmospheric reanalysis fluxes and quality controlled ocean observations.

Accelerated Global Warming
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