Rep. Ed Markey speaking on the importance of adequate science funding. (Credit: AP)

By Michael Conathon, via The Center for American Progress

In September 2013 the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, which regulates America’s fisheries, will be up for reauthorization for the first time since it was previously amended in 2006. The process that led to the most recent reauthorization took a contentious and laborious seven years of debate in Congress and led to dramatic changes in the law. Perhaps the most ambitious amendment was the addition of a requirement for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, to set annual catch limits — caps on how much fishermen can catch of each of the fish stocks that NOAA manages.

Earlier this month the House Committee on Natural Resources formally kicked off the Magnuson reauthorization festivities with a hearing that, according to Committee Chairman Doc Hastings (R-WA), was “intended to highlight issues that could provide the basis for future hearings.” A hearing about future hearings: government efficiency at its finest.

Most remarkable about this particular bit of political theater was that peeling back the veneer of partisanship that rules House proceedings these days revealed an almost unanimous agreement that, again in the words of Rep. Hastings, “many of the current challenges may not be due to the Act itself, but rather with its implementation.”

This realization tracks well with a Natural Resources Defense Council, or NRDC, report issued earlier this month. The NRDC found that since the Magnuson-Stevens Act was amended in 1996 to require overfished stocks to be rebuilt within 10 years, nearly two-thirds of all once-overfished stocks have met their target numbers. As a result, revenues from U.S. commercial fishing have increased by 54 percent since 1996 when adjusted for inflation, with fishermen receiving more than half a billion dollars in additional revenue annually.

While this accomplishment is remarkable, it doesn’t extend to all fisheries or all regions of the country. The rising tide of improved fishery management in the United States has not lifted all boats. New England, for example, is still home to 11 overfished stocks — more than twice as many as any other region, according to NOAA’s 2011 “Status of Stocks” report to Congress. And each region of the country has at least one stock of fish on the overfished list.

So if you’re a charter-boat captain trying to get red snapper for your customers in the Gulf of Mexico—where the recreational season lasted just 40 days in 2012 — or if you’re a groundfisherman in New England facing 77 percent cuts to your quota of Gulf of Maine cod, NRDC’s big-picture statistics don’t do a whole lot for your bottom line.

While virtually everyone who spoke at this month’s House hearing agreed that the Magnuson-Stevens Act should remain in place and that the lingering difficulties were due to implementation and not the legislation itself, the question of how to resolve these problems raised a far more contentious debate.

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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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“Folks, last week, President Obama cynically used the inaugural address to push his radical pro-survival agenda. Folks, I didn’t think this part of his speech would get any traction, because there’s no national consensus on climate change. It’s like if JFK announced the Apollo program, but half the country denied the Moon exists.” -Stephen Colbert

“And reality has a well-known liberal bias.” -Stephen Colbert

The House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology has a subpanel on the environment — and it has become a strange thing to watch this year.

Its new chairman is a climate denier. It scheduled a hearing about climate change featuring climate deniers but since most of Washington DC shut down for a blizzard that manifested itself in the city as a lot of rain, they postponed it. Other committees, like the House Energy and Commerce Committee, have been refusing to hold hearings on climate change. Therefore this subcommittee is becoming the only option to hear in person what the House of Representatives thinks about climate change (short of catching a one minute speech on the House floor from the Safe Climate Caucus).

On Wednesday, the subcommittee on the environment investigated the EPA’s Science Advisory Board. This is the EPA’s scientific body it consults as it writes regulations — such as clean air and fracking rules.

Last year, the House GOP introduced legislation to reform the board because it said there is not enough industry representation, and too many scientific experts on the board receive EPA grants. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse showed in 2008 how industry (i.e. ExxonMobil and Dow) can gain harmful influence over scientific panels. During this hearing, the members debated similar legislation for the new congress.

Francesca Grifo of the Union of Concerned Scientists testified that the draft bill would not help the integrity of the scientific process:

This draft bill contains provisions that would slow the work of the Scientific Advisory Board, remove longstanding and widely accepted practices for dealing with conflicts of interest and reduce the expertise of Scientific Advisory Board members.”

This debate appears to be more an instance of lawmakers seeing data they do not like, and going back to the drawing board to change the rules to get a different result. There is scientific consensus that humans cause climate change, that it is a serious threat to our civilization, and we need to act now.

Subcommittee Chairman Chris Stewart (R-UT) finished his statement noting he was just here to help: “If the EPA scientific process is viewed as being biased, or less than willing to consider every point of view, their credibility suffers.” This would have been more credible if he had not just introduced the EPA as a job-killing monster:

Whether it is promulgating air quality regulations that could shut down large swaths of the West, undertaking thinly veiled attacks on the safety of hydraulic fracturing, or pursuing job-killing climate regulations that will have no impact on the climate, EPA’s reputation as a lightning rod for controversy is well known here in Washington and throughout the country.

When a series of doctors tell a patient about a serious health condition, accusing the doctors of bias does not heal anything.

The House Science, Space and Technology Committee has named a climate science denier congressman as the new chairman of the subcommittee responsible for climate change issues. With Rep. Chris Stewart (R-UT) as subcommittee chair, House Science has no shortage of climate deniers making science their prime target.

Stewart uses familiar Republican tactics to argue against cutting our greenhouse gas pollution: He told Mother Jones he is unconvinced anthropogenic global warming is “based upon sound science” — despite 97 percent of climate scientists saying otherwise — “before we make any long-lasting policy decisions that could negatively affect our economy.”

Stewart also told The Salt Lake Tribune:

“I’m not as convinced as a lot of people are that man-made climate change is the threat they think it is. I think it is probably not as immediate as some people do.” [...]

“What is the real threat? What are the economic impacts of those threats? And what are the economic impacts of those remedies?” he asked, explaining his approach. “Some of the remedies are more expensive to our economy than the threat may turn out to be.”

For more context of Stewart’s views, just look at where he is directing the subcommittee’s attention. At a hearing Wednesday, Stewart knocked the EPA’s extensive review of rules that protect the air and lamented that industry-funded research play too small a role at the agency. Not surprisingly, oil and gas was a top player in funding Stewart’s election to Congress.

Weeks ago, House Science attempted to hold a hearing stacked with climate deniers as witnesses (only to be foiled by bad weather that same day).

Back in Stewart’s home state, The Salt Lake Tribune has urged Utah leaders to take the opposite action. In a strong editorial, the paper pointed fingers at lawmakers for their ignorance, “blind or willful,” that has “transformed climate change into a political issue rather than the global threat it clearly is proving to be.”

Cross-posted from National Geographic

One of the most important and threatening risks of climate change is sea-level rise (SLR). The mechanisms are well understood, and the direction of changes in sea-level is highly certain – it is rising and the rate of rise will accelerate. There remain plenty of uncertainties (i.e., a range of possible outcomes) about the timing and rate of rise that have to do with how fast we continue to put greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the responses of (especially) ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, and the sensitivity of the climate.

Even little changes can have big consequences. As we saw with Superstorm Sandy, where extremely severe weather was combined with a very high tide, on top of sea levels that have risen six to nine inches over the past century, even a little bit of sea-level rise around the world has the potential to cause hundreds of billions of dollars of damages and the displacement of millions of people.

The Pacific Institute, among many other organizations, has been working to understand and evaluate the nature of the threat of sea-level rise and the risks posed to coastal populations, property, and ecosystems. In 1990, a colleague and I published the first detailed mapping and economic assessment of the risks of sea-level rise to the San Francisco Bay Area, looking at populations at risk, the value of property in new flood zones, and the costs of building some kinds of coastal protection (“adaptation”) to protect higher valued assets. That early report can be found here.

Then, in 2009 and 2010, the Pacific Institute, with funding from the State of California, conducted a detailed, high-resolution mapping analysis of the entire coast from Oregon to Mexico. We analyzed a set of sea-level rise scenarios developed by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and worked with the California Energy Commission, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the Ocean Protection Council, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the US Geological Survey, FEMA, and others to evaluate the risks to people, property, transportation infrastructure, ecosystems, power plants, wastewater treatment plants, and more, should those scenarios of sea-level rise happen. The full peer-reviewed report, the high resolution maps, specialty maps, and all open source GIS data can be publicly downloaded here. (A peer-reviewed journal article was also published.) That analysis suggests coastal regions are highly vulnerable to even modest sea-level rises with hundreds of thousands of people and more than a hundred billion dollars of infrastructure already in zones at risk of future flooding.
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