By Michael D. Lemonick via Climate Central

When 97 percent of Greenland’s ice experienced at least some melting in July 2012, scientists wondered if it was a one-time phenomenon. Now a new study in Geophysical Research Letters indicates it is a sign of things to come and by 2025, there is a 50-50 chance of it happening annually.

Extent of surface melt over Greenland’s ice sheet on July 8, 2012 (left) and July 12, 2012. In just a few days, the melting had dramatically accelerated and an estimated 97 percent of the ice sheet surface had thawed. Credit: NASA.

It’s not clear what the effects of such melting will be: the majority of Greenland’s ice loss, which has accelerated significantly over the past decade, comes from glaciers shedding more ice into the sea, and moving faster toward the sea, not from melting snow and ice at higher elevations of the ice sheet.

Nevertheless, such widespread melting indicates an overall warming in the region that could threaten the ice more generally, adding significantly to the threat of sea level rise.

The 2025 projection is based on two factors, according to lead author Dan McGrath, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. The first is a series of temperature measurements going back to 1950 at the Summit research station, at the highest — and on average, the coldest — point on the Greenland ice sheet. The mercury has been rising more or less steadily there for that entire time, with the fastest increase, of about .22° F per year, coming since 1992. “That’s six times faster than the global average,” McGrath said in an interview.

The highest parts of the ice sheet still remain below the freezing mark virtually all the time, but when unusual weather conditions set in — an especially warm air mass, or as in the case of the 2012 melting, an influx of clouds just thin enough to let sunlight through but thick enough to block heat from escaping — the thermometer can sneak above 32°F. “Only an hour above freezing is enough to start the surface melting,” McGrath said.

Another factor that went into the analysis involved what’s known as the equilibrium line — the altitude where the snow is neither piling up year to year nor shrinking. Over the past 20 years or so, that transition zone has been gradually moving up the ice sheet by about 115 feet every year, on average— another indication that temperatures on the frozen island are warming.

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On the sixth-month anniversary of superstorm Sandy, NBC evening news looked at whether rising seas and ever-worsening storms could destroy beach living.

Of course the answer is that it could and probably will on our current emissions path:

NBC: “The three feet of sea level rise predicted by the end of the century could swamp the jersey shore and redraw the coastline of florida. more immediate is the one-two punch of rising seas and storm surge. Scientists estimate some $500 billion of residential real estate will be at risk for severe coastal flooding by 2030.”

Scientist: “We have always been able to depend upon a constant shoreline. It’s going to be a hard lesson to learn. This is a new planet we are living on.”

It would have been nice if once in the story, NBC could have brought themselves to utter the words “climate change” or “global warming” — let alone mention the carbon pollution that is causing this ever-worsening situation.

The bottom line is that unless we act ASAP there will hardly be any real beaches left in a few decades (see “Polar ice sheet mass loss is speeding up, on pace for 1 foot sea level rise by 2050“). And post-2050, seas rising several inches a decade will make it impossible to sustain coastal properties, particularly in areas threatened by supercharged storms and the deadly storm surges they bring.

The video is here:

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More on how the bill to repeal North Carolina’s clean energy standard. Hint: it isn’t just the clean energy industry that likes clean energy. [Dallas Morning News]

When North Carolina Republicans brought forward a bill pushed by ALEC, the conservative lobbying group, to gut the state’s renewable energy standards this year, they figured they had a model piece of pro-business legislation that would sail through.

But, as North American Windpower gleefully reported, it died in committee.

Key to the story is the committee where it died, public utilities and energy. It died there because the state’s electrical utilities, mainly Duke Energy, which bought out rival Progress Energy last year, didn’t support it, despite the fact that the bill’s prime sponsor formerly worked there.

What happened?

Duke has found out how to make money with renewables. Its non-regulated Duke Energy Renewables unit plans to double production from wind, solar and biomass projects this decade. Big customers including Google and Apple, both of which have large data centers in the state, are supporting a new green energy rate, reports the Charlotte Business Journal.

It turns out solar and wind projects offer big advantages to electric utility companies. They can get a premium rate for solar power, whose supply peaks in the afternoon alongside the higher load of air conditioning.

Streetcar fan and Mayor of Charlotte Anthony Foxx will be President Obama’s nominee to be the next Secretary of Transportation. [Charlotte Observer]

Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) could chair the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee if she wins re-election next year. [National Journal]

EPA has revised downward its estimates of how much methane leaks from natural gas fracking practices. [AP]

New report: Australia’s coal reserves are a dangerous financial bubble, and its coal industry a dinosaur, if the world acts on cutting carbon pollution. [Guardian]

Even as China leads the world in total carbon emissions, it is also “accelerating action” on cutting electricity demand and adding renewable energy to its portfolio. [Phys.org]

Could Champagne be moving to England as temperatures rise? [Washington Post]

The Ohio EPA would like to know why natural gas pipelines are spilling slurry into their wetlands. [Columbus Dispatch]

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Scientist: “The Antarctic Peninsula has warmed to a level where even small increases in temperature can now lead to a big increase in summer ice melt.”

Credit: British Antarctic Survey

A new study finds “a nearly tenfold increase in melt intensity” on the Antarctic Peninsula in the last few hundred years.

Here’s the most worrisome news from this 1000-year reconstruction of ”ice-melt intensity and mean temperature” published in Nature Geoscience:

The warming has occurred in progressive phases since about AD 1460, but intensification of melt is nonlinear, and has largely occurred since the mid-twentieth century. Summer melting is now at a level that is unprecedented over the past 1,000 years. We conclude that ice on the Antarctic Peninsula is now particularly susceptible to rapid increases in melting and loss in response to relatively small increases in mean temperature.

In short, while some mistakenly assert the climate is less sensitive than we thought, the fact is that polar ice loss is accelerating far beyond what the models had projected even a few years ago, and the whole region appears even more sensitive than previously thought.

It was just 2006 when Penn State climatologist Richard Alley explained that observations had indicated the great ice sheets appear to be shrinking “100 years ahead of schedule.”

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported in 2011 that polar ice sheet mass loss is speeding up and is on pace for 1 foot sea level rise by 2050.

What’s happening at the South Pole, which has 90% of the world’s ice? In 2009, we learned that Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier has been thinning 4 times faster than it was 10 years ago: “Nothing in the natural world is lost at an accelerating exponential rate like this glacier.” The same year Nature reported that “Dynamic thinning of Greenland and Antarctic ice-sheet ocean margins is more sensitive, pervasive, enduring and important than previously realized.”

As for the cause, we know that “deep ocean heat is rapidly melting Antarctic ice.” And we knew that these warm ocean currents melting Antarctica were so intense that, seawater appears to “boil on the surface like a kettle on the stove.” Last April, researchers reported in Nature that this melting from below “May Already Have Triggered A Period of Unstable Glacier Retreat.” We learned in December that West Antarctica is warming three times faster than global average.

The key point is that the West Antarctic ice sheet (WAIS) is inherently far less stable than the Greenland ice sheet because most of it is grounded far below sea level. As I wrote in the “high water” part of my book:

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A new report confirms that the extreme heat waves, floods, droughts and wildfires that have wracked Australia over the past decade have been exacerbated by climate change. The report, commissioned by the Australian government’s Climate Commission, makes clear that these weather events will only get worse in the coming years, and warns that health and emergency professionals as well as citizens must prepare for their impacts now.

The study’s chief commissioner Tim Flannery said the study’s results mean Australia needs to take action to slow climate change.

FLANNERY: Records are broken from time to time, but record-breaking weather is becoming more common as the climate shifts. Only strong preventative action, with deep and swift cuts in emissions this decade, can stabilize the climate and halt the trend towards more intense extreme weather.

The study examines five impacts of climate change that have already begun to affect Australia:

• Heat: Australia broke 123 weather records in 90 days this summer. In January, Sydney hit a record 114 degrees, and the south Australian town of Moomba hit 121.3 degrees. The report notes that in Australia, there has been more than three times the number of record hot days than record cold days in the past 10 years. The heat has majorly impacted the country: in 2009, a heatwave led to 980 heat-related deaths, which is three times the average mortality rate for heatwaves, and heat has contributed to bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef.
• Rainfall: Extreme rainfall in Queensland in 2010 and 2011 led to record-breaking and damaging floods, which broke river height records at more than 100 observation stations. As temperature increases, the report found that the likelihood of torrential rainfall events will increase as well in some areas — a finding consistent with climate change predictions.
• Drought: Australia emerged from a decade-long drought in 2009, which was said to be the worst in the country’s history. The report states the drought was estimated to have caused an 80 percent reduction in grain production and a 40 percent reduction in livestock production, and climate models predict that rainfall in southern and eastern Australia will continue to decrease as the century progresses.
• Bushfires: Australia has seen an increase in fire weather (hot, dry, windy days) over the last 30 years, and the fire season in southeast Australia has extended into November and March. The Black Saturday fires of 2009 killed 173 people and cost about A$4.4 billion. As the duration of hot, dry days is likely to increase in much of Australia, wildfire risk is also predicted to go up.
• Sea level rise: Climate change has already contributed to a 21 centimeter rise in global sea levels, the report states, and  major flooding in 2005, 2006, 2009 and 2010 in Australia’s Torres Strait Islands were likely made more damaging by the increases in sea level.

The study confirms what climate scientists have warned for years — that climate change will likely lead to an increase in extreme weather events. It comes at a time when the effects of climate change are being felt not just in Australia, but around the world: Drastic melting of Arctic sea ice has been linked to a bitterly cold Spring in parts of Europe and North America that has devastated sheep farmers, and the record-breaking drought that affected more than half of the continental U.S. in 2012 is expected to continue into this spring and summer.

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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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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By Shiva Polefka

South Carolina news outlet TheState.com reported on Sunday that an official, comprehensive assessment of dramatic climate change impacts looming large in South Carolina’s future was buried and barred from release, apparently due to political pressure.

According to TheState.com, the report, completed by a working group of 18 senior state scientists under the auspices of the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, or DNR, found that the Palmetto State faces an average temperature rise of as much as 9 degrees Fahrenheit over the next 70 years. Along with the heat would come increases in wildlife disease, loss of habitat for wild game, degradation of the state’s valuable recreational and commercial fisheries, increases in “dead zones” off the state’s coast, and salt water intrusion into coastal rivers and freshwater aquifers.

The report also issued a dramatic warning: As South Carolina’s climate warms, it could face in-migration of harmful invasive species from Florida, including piranha and Asian swamp eels.

Even more alarming than piranhas and eels, however, is the possibility that South Carolina’s conservative state government may have suppressed the report — intended for public education and planning purposes — for political reasons.

Despite detailing major risks to vital state industries and natural resources, the document was never released after its completion in 2011. TheState.com reports that it recently “obtained” a copy but that it otherwise remains unavailable to the public. While the previous head of DNR, John Frampton, reportedly wanted to release the document for public review, he retired suddenly before the release occurred, after what he claimed was pressure to resign from an administrative appointee of Governor Nikki Haley.

According to TheState.com, DNR’s new director says the agency’s “priorities have changed,” to matters including expansion of the ports of Savannah and Charleston, and a new gold mine.

Unfortunately, the developments in South Carolina resemble the woeful political meddling in strategic planning for climate change of its northern neighbor. In 2010, a study from the State of North Carolina’s Panel on Coastal Hazards used sea level rise projections of approximately one meter by 2100 — in line with the National Academy of Science and other coastal states including Maine, Florida and California — to estimate that the state should prepare for inundation and increased flood risk for more than 2,000 square miles of coastal lands. In response, North Carolina’s legislature passed a bill in 2012 mandating that coastal counties ignore the best available science, and instead follow a formula using “historical data” that projects sea level rise of no more than 8-12 inches by 2100.

Unfortunately, there has been no mention of whether South Carolina’s DNR is integrating the two-foot sea level rise reportedly predicted in its 2011 climate change report into the state’s new port expansion plans.

Shiva Polefka is a research associate in the Ocean Program at the Center for American Progress. Tiffany Germain, ThinkProgress War Room Senior Climate/Energy Researcher, contributed research.

(Photo by Iwan Baan / Reportage by Getty Images)

National Journal’s Coral Davenport has written a wide-ranging new piece laying out the myriad ways climate change, driven by human carbon emissions, is threatening the American economy. The point is backed up by myriad scientific reports: The draft of the upcoming Fifth Assessment report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change determined that, by more than a 95 percent probability, human activities are to blame over half the observed increase in the global average surface temperature since the 1950s.

The draft of the Federal Advisory Committee’s Climate Assessment Report concluded that most of the United States is in for 9 to 15 degrees Fahrenheit of warming given the current path carbon emissions are following, with with ever-worsening extreme weather, sea-level rise, heat waves, deluges, droughts, storms, flooding, and ocean acidification as the result.

Using specific stories ranging from Norfolk, Virginia, to Netarts Bay in Oregon, to St. Louis, Missouri, Davenport illustrates the ways these impending upheavals in the climate and ecosystems can and already are undermining Americans’ chances of recovering from the Great Recession — or of prospering in future decades.

The Economic Costs Of Extreme Weather

Globally, extreme weather and climate change are already shaving 1.6 percent off worldwide gross domestic product — or about $1.2 trillion per year — according to a study by DARA. By 2030, it will be up 3.2 percent of global GDP, costing the United States over 2 percent of its GDP and India over 5 percent.

In the U.S. specifically, the heat waves and droughts that continue to sweep through Texas, Oklahoma and the Midwest have driven crop yields down a food prices up, resulting in record payouts for crop-insurance claims. Davenport cites a 2011 study by the consulting firm Mercer that warned climate change could increase investment-portfolio risk by 10 percent over the next two decades, by disrupting supply chains.

The country is suffering larger and more frequent wildfires, storms are damaging infrastructure and causing power outages and fuel-price spikes, and relief aid for Superstorm Sandy alone cost the federal government over $60 billion:

2011 and 2012 were the two most extreme years on record for destructive weather events. A record 14 weather disasters occurred in 2011, sustaining more than $1 billion each in economic losses for a total of $60.6 billion. Last year brought 11 weather disasters that each cost $1 billion or more; while the total economic loss has not been determined, experts say the dollar figure is almost certain to exceed 2011’s. Meanwhile, the insurance industry estimates that its losses from 2012’s natural disasters will total $58 billion—more than double the average yearly losses of $27 billion from 2000 to 2011.

Alternating droughts and floods have even disrupted shipping traffic on the Mississippi River, and lowered water levels on the Great Lakes have raised shipping companies’ costs by an average of up to 22 percent.

Ocean Acidification And The Marine Industries

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The bad news is that we’re all but certain to end up with a coastline at least this flooded (20 meters or 69 feet):

The “good” news is that this might take 1000 to 2000 years (or longer), and the choices we make now can affect the rate of rise and whether we blow past 69 feet to beyond 200 feet.

Glaciologist Jason Box makes this point in a Climate Desk interview with Chris Mooney, “Humans Have Already Set in Motion 69 Feet of Sea Level Rise“:

So what can we do? For Box, any bit of policy helps. “The more we can cool climate, the slower Greenland’s loss will be,” he explained. Cutting greenhouse gases slows the planet’s heating, and with it, the pace of ice sheet losses.

This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who follows the scientific literature. Just last year the National Science Foundation (NSF) reported on paleoclimate research that examined “rock and soil cores taken in Virginia, New Zealand and the Eniwetok Atoll in the north Pacific Ocean.” Lead author Kenneth Miller of Rutgers University said:

“The natural state of the Earth with present carbon dioxide levels is one with sea levels about 70 feet higher than now.”

And that was only slightly less worrisome than a 2009 paper in Science that found the last time CO2 levels were this high, it was 5° to 10°F warmer and seas were 75 to 120 feet higher.
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