Climate Change

Welcome to the Climate Change Blog!

Note: I have been collecting scientific articles about climate change, and, because of constraints on my time, I have decided to stop collecting articles. I have a lot of articles documented in this blog. Scientists are coming to the realization that natural caused are important as a cause of climate change. Persons favoring natural causes are coming to the realization that humans are an important cause of climate change. Time will tell which way the debate goes. If you have serious concerns about climate change, please leave your comments on appropriate pages, and I will respond to the comments, as appropriate. AWL 12/6/2013

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People have been arguing for decades about climate change. Some say changes in our climate are natural and are nothing for us to worry about. Others say changes are due to man-made emissions and that, to preserve our climate and possibly life on earth, we must reduce those emissions. Many of the arguments are based on emotional feelings with little basis in factual information.

In order to provide some degree of sanity in these discussions, I have created this blog in which results of scientific research are given. Links to new scientific reports are made via additions to existing posts, although new posts will be created if appropriate posts for the new information do not exist. At the top of each page are navigational links to various categories. All of the posts in this blog are in those categories, and by clicking a category-link, you will get a page that links to the posts that pertain to that category. The Site Map page has links to all of the pages in the site.

This blog does not take a position about climate change. I hope you will read the reports about scientific research and form reasonable conclusions about Climate Change. In addition, you are invited to share your viewpoints via comments to the posts!

Science Manipulation of Climate

Many people are debating the causes of climate change. Some scientists who believe climate change is real suggest that our environment be manipulated to reduce the effects of climate change. This post is tracking suggestions by scientists for the geo-engineering of our climate.

Geoengineering, the use of human technologies to alter Earth's climate system -- such as injecting reflective particles into the upper atmosphere to scatter incoming sunlight back to space -- has emerged as a potentially promising way to mitigate the impacts of climate change. But such efforts could present unforeseen new risks. That inherent tension, argue two professors from UCLA and Harvard, has thwarted both scientific advances and the development of an international framework for regulating and guiding geoengineering research.

Numerous geo-engineering schemes have been suggested as possible ways to reduce levels of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and so reduce the risk of global warming and climate change. One such technology involves dispersing large quantities of iron salts in the oceans to fertilize otherwise barren parts of the sea and trigger the growth of algal blooms and other photosynthesizing marine life. Photosynthesis requires carbon dioxide as its feedstock and when the algae die they will sink to the bottom of the sea taking the locked in carbon with them.

But a University of Iowa law professor believes the legal ramifications of this kind of geo-engineering need to be thought through in advance and a global governance structure put in place soon to oversee these efforts.

Natural Causes of Climate Change

This page discusses natural causes of climate change.

The Greenland ice sheet is melting from below, caused by a high heat flow from the mantle into the lithosphere. This influence is very variable spatially and has its origin in an exceptionally thin lithosphere. Consequently, there is an increased heat flow from the mantle and a complex interplay between this geothermal heating and the Greenland ice sheet. The international research initiative IceGeoHeat led by the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences establishes in the current online issue of Nature Geoscience that this effect cannot be neglected when modeling the ice sheet as part of a climate study.

Natural swings in the climate have significantly intensified Northern Hemisphere monsoon rainfall, showing that these swings must be taken into account for climate predictions in the coming decades, a new study finds.

One important factor in climate change is natural causes, that is, aspects of our earth, other than effects of people, that affect our climate. Natural causes of climate change include the earth itself, winds, volcanoes, and ocean currents. Most of these factors are discussed in other posts. This post contains links to factors affecting climate changes that are not discussed in other places.
Ancient rises in sea levels and global warming are partially attributable to cyclical activity below Earth's surface, researchers from New York University and Ottawa's Carleton University have concluded in an analysis of geological studies.

However, the article's authors, NYU's Michael Rampino and Carleton University's Andreas Prokoph, note that changes spurred by Earth's interior are gradual, taking place in periods ranging from 60 million to 140 million years -- far less rapidly than those brought on by human activity.

A team led by the University of Colorado Boulder looking for clues about why Earth did not warm as much as scientists expected between 2000 and 2010 now thinks the culprits are hiding in plain sight -- dozens of volcanoes spewing sulfur dioxide.

"We have shown that adding polar storms into computer-generated models of the ocean results in significant changes in ocean circulation -- including an increase in heat traveling north in the Atlantic Ocean and more overturning in the Sub-polar seas.

Lead author, Dr Paul Holland of BAS says: "Until now these changes in ice drift were only speculated upon, using computer models of Antarctic winds. This study of direct satellite observations shows the complexity of climate change. The total Antarctic sea-ice cover is increasing slowly, but individual regions are actually experiencing much larger gains and losses that are almost offsetting each other overall. We now know that these regional changes are caused by changes in the winds, which in turn affect the ice cover through changes in both ice drift and air temperature. The changes in ice drift also suggest large changes in the ocean surrounding Antarctica, which is very sensitive to the cold and salty water produced by sea-ice growth.

"In the temperature curves from the ice cores we can see that there is no general global cooling as a result of the eruption. There is certainly a cooling and large fluctuations in temperature in the northern hemisphere, but it becomes warmer in the southern hemisphere, so the global cooling has been short," says Anders Svensson.

Reports of declining ice coverage and drowning polar bears in the Arctic illustrate dramatic ecosystem responses to global climate change in Earth's polar regions. But in this first-ever account of a long-term project in the southern Caribbean, a Stony Brook professor and his colleagues report in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that tropical ecosystems are also affected by global climatic trends -- and with accompanying economic impacts.

Lead author Dr Stewart Jamieson, a glaciologist at the Department of Geography, Durham University, said: "Our research shows that the physical shape of the channels is a more important factor in controlling ice stability than was previously realised. Channel width can have a major effect on ice flow, and determines how fast retreat, and therefore sea-level rise, can happen.

Climate Models

An important aspect of climate scientists is the creation of models that give approximations of our climate. These models allow scientists to understand current climate conditions and to predict future climate conditions. This page gives links to scientific research about climate models.

They found a fairly high degree of consensus on the general character of the pace of climate change. In response to an instantaneous increase in greenhouse gas emissions, climate change is fast out of the starting gate but then slows down, and takes a long time to approach the finish line.
There is substantial quantitative disagreement among climate models, however. For example, one model reaches 38 percent of the maximum warming in the first decade after a step increase in CO2 concentration, while another model reaches 61 percent of the maximum warming in this time period. Similarly, one model reaches only 60 percent of maximum warming in the first century after the step increase, while another achieves 86 percent of maximum warming during this interval.

Scientists from UC Irvine and the National Center for Atmospheric Research have developed a new computer model to measure global warming's effect on soil worldwide that accounts for how bacteria and fungi in soil control carbon.

New research findings from the Centre for Permafrost (CENPERM) at the Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management, University of Copenhagen, document that permafrost during thawing may result in a substantial release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and that the future water content in the soil is crucial to predict the effect of permafrost thawing. The findings may lead to more accurate climate models in the future.

"The fact that we are experiencing more fires and that climate change may increase fire frequency underscores the need to include these specialized particles in the computer models, and our results show how this can be done," Dubey said.

Only a few climate models were able to reproduce the observed changes in extreme precipitation in China over the last 50 years. This is the finding of a doctoral thesis from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

It seems counterintuitive that clouds over the Southern Ocean, which circles Antarctica, would cause rain in Zambia or the tropical island of Java. But new research finds that one of the most persistent biases in global climate models -- a phantom band of rainfall just south of the equator that does not occur in reality -- is caused by poor simulation of the cloud cover thousands of miles farther to the south.

Researchers rely on models that use estimated ice thickness data and simulated atmospheric conditions to forecast how sea ice will change during the summer. For the first time, near real-time ice thickness data obtained by NASA's Operation IceBridge has been used to correct a forecast model's initial measurements, which could lead to improved seasonal predictions.

"We have shown that adding polar storms into computer-generated models of the ocean results in significant changes in ocean circulation -- including an increase in heat traveling north in the Atlantic Ocean and more overturning in the Sub-polar seas.

The researchers tested their approach on data originally taken in 1996 and 1997 in the Labrador Sea, an arm of the North Atlantic Ocean that lies between Greenland and Canada. They included satellite observations of ice cover, as well as local readings of wind speed, water and air temperature, and water salinity. The approach produced a tight fit between simulated and observed sea-ice and ocean conditions in the Labrador Sea -- a large improvement over existing models.

"New climate models will have to take these findings into account," says Professor Dr. Thorsten Hoffmann of the Institute of Inorganic Chemistry and Analytical Chemistry at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) in Germany. The Mainz researchers contributed primarily to the development of analytical techniques for studying the chemical composition of the aerosol particles in the Muchachas project. Thanks to their development of so-called 'soft ionization' techniques and the corresponding mass spectrometers, Hoffmann's work group was able to track the concentration of individual molecule species in the atmospheric simulation chamber and thus observe the chemical aging of the atmospheric aerosols at the molecular level. It was clearly demonstrated that oxidation occurred in the gaseous phase and not in the particle phase. "Now the goal is to integrate these underlying reactions in models of regional and global atmospheric chemistry and so reduce the discrepancy between the expected and the actually observed concentrations of organic aerosol particles," explains Hoffmann.

Climate-prediction models show skills in forecasting climate trends over time spans of greater than 30 years and at the geographical scale of continents, but they deteriorate when applied to shorter time frames and smaller geographical regions, a new study has found.

The findings do not change broader concerns about global warming. Temperatures are still projected to increase about four to 11 degrees by the end of this century, and the study actually confirms that some of the world’s most sophisticated climate models are accurate.

In the 1990s, observations did not show the troposphere, particularly in the tropics, to be warming, even though surface temperatures were rapidly warming. This lack of tropospheric warming was used by some to question both the reality of the surface warming trend and the reliability of climate models as tools. This new paper extensively reviews the relevant scientific analyses — 195 cited papers, model results and atmospheric data sets — and finds that there is no longer evidence for a fundamental discrepancy and that the troposphere is warming.

One popular climate record that shows a slower atmospheric warming trend than other studies contains a data calibration problem, and when the problem is corrected the results fall in line with other records and climate models, according to a new University of Washington study.

"One of the criticisms from climate-change skeptics is that different climate models give different results, so they argue that they don't know what to believe," he said. "We wanted to develop a way to determine the likelihood of different outcomes, and combine them into a consensus climate projection. We show that there are shared conclusions upon which scientists can agree with some certainty, and we are able to statistically quantify that certainty."

Climate Change and Weather

Scientists are investigating various aspects of climate change. One aspect that is getting a lot of attention from scientists is our weather. It is important that we understand how and why weather changes occur, because we all are affected by weather.

Here are links to some of the research about weather.

A new survey commissioned by the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Center for Ocean Solutions finds that an overwhelming majority of Americans want to prepare in order to minimize the damage likely to be caused by global warming-induced sea-level rise and storms.

Molina emphasized that there is no "absolute certainty" that global warming is causing extreme weather events. But he said that scientific insights during the last year or so strengthen the link. Even if the scientific evidence continues to fall short of the absolute certainly measure, the heat, drought, severe storms and other weather extremes may prove beneficial in making the public more aware of global warming and the need for action, said Molina.