The report, Scientific Assessment of the Effects of Global Change on the United States, was released today by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. According to the Government Accountability Project, the study was “years overdue under a requirement of law” and was prepared only after a federal court order last year set a release deadline of May 31, 2008.

Among the report’s highlights (or lowlights, depending on your perspective):

The northern parts of Alaska can expect the greatest warming, most noticeably during the winter months, in years to come;

By the end of this century, the U.S. will warm by an average of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, although about one-fourth of climate models project average warming greater than 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit;

While the effect of climate change on hurricane frequency is unresolved, rainfall and wind speeds of tropical storms are likely to increase. In fact, over much of North America, rain is expected to fall less frequently, but more intensely;

Continued warming will drive cool-weather and alpine species farther north or higher up, though some mountain species might eventually find themselves with “nowhere to migrate”;

As the tundra shifts northward in Alaska, forests will move in to replace it. The increase in carbon dioxide uptake thanks to more trees, though, will be offset by the decreased reflectivity of the region, which will mean more sunlight absorption and warmer temperatures;

Those tree-killing bug outbreaks and dead tree-fueled forest fires in Alaska, the West and Southwest? Expect more of them in years to come. For regions not accustomed to a regular fire cycle, that could mean the death knell for species like the saguaro cactus and the Joshua tree;

Small islands with cloud forests such as those found in Hawaii are likely to see some high-elevation species, especially birds, go extinct;

Salt marsh habitats and barrier island ecosystems? Goodbye. The U.S. has already lost more than half its original salt marsh habitat, the report notes, and rising sea levels will threaten much of what’s left;

Some agricultural crops might see an initial productivity boost as carbon dioxide levels and temperatures rise, but the long-term impact could be more crop failures … especially as climate-driven weeds and crop diseases expand;

People might increasingly move from climate-affected regions to other parts of the U.S., altering population centers and economic activity. The reason in many cases might not be climate per se but changes in the availability of insurance;

Transportation infrastructure (already crumbling in many parts of the country because of lack of investment) will feel the hurt of climate change, especially in Alaska, where melting permafrost is making the landscape shift dramatically, and in coastal areas like the Gulf Coast.

In short, whether you live in a highly vulnerable area like Alaska or the desert Southwest, or somewhere else, you’re likely to feel the impact of climate change in one way or another.

As Rick Piltz, director of the Government Accountability Project’s Climate Science Watch program, put it,  “the world has lost precious years to Bush administration officials’ spin, which has failed to prepare our country to deal effectively with the problem.”

The Amazon is without a doubt one of the planet’s most valuable and important ecological resources; and not for logging. The rainforest contains approximately one tenth of the total carbon stored in land ecosystems, and recycles much of the rain that falls upon its leafy canopy.

Thus, any major change to its vegetation has massive implications for the global climate system.

During the 70’s and 80’s, sulphate aerosol particles being emitted from the burning of coal have contributed to partly reducing global warming in the northern hemisphere, by reflecting sunlight and making clouds brighter. As a result, this pollution has helped to limit the warming in the tropical north Atlantic.

This has kept the Amazon wetter, than had the global warming been allowed to increase the temperature in that part of the world as well. Chris Huntingford of CEH, one of the studies co-authors, explains: “Reduced sulphur emissions in North America and Europe will see tropical rain-bands move northwards as the north Atlantic warms, resulting in a sharp increase in the risk of Amazonian drought”.

A team from the University of Exeter, Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Met Office Hadley Centre and Brazilian National Institute for Space Studies used a climate carbon model at the Met Office Hadley Center to simulate the impacts of 21^st century climate change on the Amazon. They then compared data from the 2005 drought – which had caused massive devastation to the Amazon basin – and found that by 2025, a drought on this scale could happen every other year, and by 2060 a drought could occur in nine out of every ten years.

There are a number of factors playing havoc with the Amazon, as co-Author Dr Carlos Nobre of the Brazilian Institute for Space Research explains: “Global warming, deforestation and increased forest fires are all acting in synergy to reduce the resilience of the Amazonian forests”.

While another of the co-authors, Dr Matthew Collins of the Met Office Hadley Centre, summed up the future: “The rainforest is under many pressures. Direct deforestation is the most obvious immediate threat, but climate change is also a big issue for Amazonia. We have to deal with both if we want to safeguard the forest.”

Image Courtesy of markg6 via Flickr

Source - Press Release

According to Cristina Archer and Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology, Earth’s jet streams are shifting; possibly as a result of global warming. However they are upfront with the fact that they need to do more research before they can pinpoint what will happen, and why it is happening.

Jet streams are the high-altitude bands of fast moving wind that influence the paths of storms and other weather systems. “The jet streams are the driving factor for weather in half of the globe,” says Archer. “So, as you can imagine, changes in the jets have the potential to affect large populations and major climate systems.”

The Carnegie pair studied research taken over a 23 year span from 1979 to 2001, consisting of changes in the average position and strength of the planets jet streams. The data came from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, the National Centers for Environmental Protection, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and included outputs from weather prediction models, conventional observations from weather balloons and surface instruments, and remote observations from satellites.

MSNBC focused upon evidence that the jet stream in the northern hemisphere – what they label “America’s stormy weather maker” – is moving northward and weakening in intensity. What that means for the US is less rain in the already dry South and Southwest of the country, and an increase in storms in the north.

Jet streams have another impact upon the weather systems, that of suppressing the development of hurricanes. With the US jet stream dissipating and moving north, Archer and Caldeira suspect that the number of hurricanes could increase, and the strength grow.

Consider this analogy; a part of town with a medium crime rate already has large police protection. But imagine if that police protection decided to move away. With whatever was keeping that crime rate down moving away, the crime rate would increase. The same can be said for hurricanes, with the jet streams moving away from the sub-tropical zones where hurricanes are born.

The changes to Earth’s jet stream’s is consistent with numerous other signals of global warming. Those other signals include the widening of the tropical belt, the cooling of the stratosphere and the poleward shift of storm tracks. However this is the first study to use observation-based datasets to examine these trends in the jet streams.

“At this point we can’t say for sure that this is the result of global warming, but I think it is,” says Caldeira. “I would bet that the trend in the jet streams’ positions will continue. It is something I’d put my money on.”

Photo Courtesy of Space Ritual via Flickr

I call this story “How to Successfully Undermine Good Ideas” thanks to a recent article written over at LiveScience.com entitled “Top 10 Craziest Environmental Ideas.” And, in short, several of their “zany ideas” are possible chances for survival.

I normally don’t like to just ridicule other websites or authors; it’s not sporting, but Andrea Thompson has got me all riled up. And while in amidst her Top 10 there are some insanely zany ideas, I think she has relatively effectively attempted to screw with a few really good ideas.

The list is as follows;

10. Ban Plastic Bags and Light Bulbs

9. Cut and Cap Emissions

8. Live in Trash

7. Bury the Carbon

6. Change Your Diet

5. Keep Worms in the Kitchen

4. Fill the Air With Sulfur

3. Get the Ocean Moving and Mixing

2. Give the Ocean a Dose of Iron

1. Build Earth Some Sunglasses

Now, let’s be honest; numbers 5, 4 and 1 are just insane, if for no other reason than the last place I want worms trundling around is my kitchen. And numbers 10, 8, 6 and 2 are all just a bit too tough to pull off; seriously, how many of the men do you know are going to reduce their intake of red meat (but that doesn’t mean that they are zany ideas).

My issues were with numbers 9, 7 and 3; each idea is scientifically valid, and could help significantly. To add them to a “Craziest Ideas” list is not only insulting, it’s damaging.

I’m not going to go in to the reasons why these ideas are good, because at GO we’ve already done this for you. Hence the massive list of stories below here that you should check out! But the point of the matter is, Andrea Thompson has done a major disservice to environmental science.

More from the GO Network

10. - San Francisco Votes To Ban The Plastic Bag, Red, Green & Blue: Is It Time for a Plastic Bag R.I.P.?, California to ban the lightbulb?

9. Is Cap-and-Trade the Best CO2 Policy?, Bush’s Legacy Definitely not Climate Change

7. Lots of Room to Sequester CO2, Stop Coal, Stop Global Warming, Untapped Coal Reserves: A Bridge to Cleaner Energy Solutions?

6. Consider Cutting the Meat Out

3. Millions of Pipes to Solve Global Warming

2. Fertilizing The Ocean – Great Idea or Eco Disaster?, India to Test South Atlantic Carbon Sink in 2009

Researchers at the University of Colorado in Boulder, US, found that Earth’s atmosphere contained very little light-blocking volcanic dust. During the eclipse, Earth blocks sunlight from reaching the moon – hence why the moon is obscured in darkness for a time. Naturally, some light will make it through, refracted through the Earth’s atmosphere.

However the amount that refracts through is normally tempered by how much volcanic dust is in the atmosphere to block it. “All the big dimmings of the Moon during eclipses can be attributed to specific volcanoes,” says Richard Keen of UC Boulder.

Keen and his fellow researchers at UC Boulder have been charting the brightness of lunar eclipses back to 1960, as well as adding a few years either side of the 1883 eruption of Indonesia’s Krakatoa volcano to the mix. From this data, they have been tracking the changes in opacity of Earth’s atmosphere.

This obviously has implications for our climate in that, the less dust there is reflecting light away from the planet’s surface the more there is reaching it.

Keen and his colleagues calculate that, because more sunlight is reaching the surface, Earth should be 0.1 to 0.2° Celsius warmer in recent years than it was back in the late 60s.

This increase in temperature is a hitherto unforeseen addition to the .06° Celsius rise that our planet has encountered of late. The IPCC has pinned the majority of that warming on greenhouse gas. They add that other factors including fluctuating patterns in ocean circulation and slight changes in the Sun’s brightness could also have influenced the climate.

“All of these have been contributing to a warming, adding on top of each other,” Keen told New Scientist. “The difficulty is, of course, what are the relative magnitudes [of these effects],” he says.

Susan Solomon of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colorado, a member of the Nobel-prize-winning team that put together the 2007 IPCC report said however that volcanic haze fluctuations were introduced in to the models used for their report. She disputes Keen’s concerns; “There’s no evidence for a significant warming trend over the last several decades [due to a decline in volcanic haze],” she told New Scientist. “In fact, it’s exactly the opposite.”

Solomon notes that over the past 40 years – compared to the 20 years prior – the amount of haze in the stratosphere has been higher. Thus, over the past 60 years, there would have – if anything – been a slight cooling trend if volcanic haze were the only influence on the climate.

And while Keen acknowledges this, he argues that the relatively long period since 1995 with a relatively haze-free atmosphere could be having a considerably larger than anticipated impact on our climate. He points also to theories of long term effects through the current-day heating of our oceans, as an impact the added sunshine could be having.

Keen is now compiling more precise estimates of the brightness of our most recent lunar eclipse, occurring on the 20-21 of last February, so that the amount of haze in the atmosphere can be calculated more efficiently.

New Scientist - Lunar eclipse may shed light on climate change

Image Courtesy of NASA

That isn’t to say that scientific debate is not necessary or needed; only, that it seems that the obvious seems to bypass people as simply another annoying fact against their chosen belief.

In addition, there are those who feel that they have an ace up their sleeves when they talk to me. They feel that knowledge of increasingly colder temperatures and unexpected snow storms is evidence not of global warming, but of global cooling. They put the card down on the table with a grin. They seem to exude complete confidence in me not having a full house of cards that were actually dealt to me.

In other words, how come people look at the recent weird weather anomalies which most climate change advocates will themselves use as proof of a changing planet, but fail to look at years of steadily climbing temperatures?

All of that is simply by way of pointing to new research showing that greenhouse gas emissions will have to be entirely eliminated in order for our climate to stabilize and to prevent our temperatures from rising.

In response to that I say two things; a) well duh and b) why, for the love of Pete, did it take a scientific study to bring this to peoples attention?

Damon Matthews from Concordia University in Canada and Ken Caldeira from Carnegie Institute for Science, Stanford, in the US, are the men behind this research. They show that our current efforts to simply stabilize our emissions – rather than eradicating our emissions – are simply not enough.

“Even if we eliminated carbon dioxide today we are still committed to a global temperature rise of around 0.8 ºC lasting at least 500 years,” says Caldeira. As to why carbon dioxide persists so long, Caldeira points to the slow response time of our many oceans. “It takes a lot of energy to heat them up and then a long time for them to cool back down,” he adds.

Their study used a global climate model that, instead of only looking at what happens when the emissions have stabilized, looked at how greenhouse emissions need to change in order to stabilize the global temperature.

Matthews and Caldeira created four models, each of which began with a single pulse of carbon dioxide in to a pre-industrial atmosphere (to mimic but simplify the steady increase of carbon dioxide emissions over the past hundred years or so). Pulse sizes of 50, 200, 500 and 2000 billion tons of carbon made up the four models.

At the end of a 500 year period in which the model calculated global temperatures and atmospheric and ocean carbon dioxide levels, the pair found that between 20% and 35% of the initial pulse had remained in the simulated atmosphere. This was true for even the smallest emission pulse. The remainder of the carbon had been absorbed by land and ocean carbon sinks.

The existence of original carbon dioxide at the end of the 500 year period signifies that global warming took place over the entire period of time. For the four simulations, respectively, global temperatures stabilized at 0.09, 0.34, 0.88 and 3.6 ºC above pre-industrial levels.

This research has received academic support from those such as Roger Pielke, a climate policy expert at the University of Colorado in Boulder. “This research makes the case that simply stabilising concentrations is insufficient to stabilise temperatures. Their argument, if widely accepted, raises the bar on what it means to mitigate climate change,” he says.

Matthews and Caldeira warned in their report, though unrealistically (and probably knowingly so), that the current emission targets for 2050 were simply insufficient. “It is technologically challenging, but not impossible. The biggest challenge will be to get political consensus,” says Caldeira.

Now, to be fair, a zero emissions future is not out of the realm of scientific possibility. In my opinion, it’s out of the realm of political possibility, but let’s all just revolt and do away with that issue. Costa Rica is already aiming towards zero emissions, and with new tools such as renewable energy, electric cars and carbon capture there are experts who believe this is a feasible goal.

Dave Reay, a climate scientist at the University of Edinburgh, is one who believes this, “If used on a large enough scale then new technologies like carbon capture could get us to zero emissions.”

Either way, it is good to at least see the evidence in the scientific world for those who hadn’t been in a position to see the obvious. As the photo suggests, the future is in our own hands!

Check out Shirley Siluk Gregory’s previous brief on this issue here.

So, in this spirit, for the first time West Antarctica (or the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS)) is to be monitored, 24/7, 365 days a year, to witness the interaction between ice and the earth below. The mission, to be lead by a team from Ohio State University, has just been awarded $4.5 million by the National Science Foundation.

Tuesday, December 11, 2007 at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, saw Terry Wilson, leader of the mission entitled POLENET, explained how they would overcome the harsh conditions.

First off is to fly ski-equipped aircraft to remote locations across the WAIS, and plant the instruments – GPS trackers and seismic sensors – on the bedrock that cradles the WAIS. These instruments will send signals back to the United States via satellite, and work year round.

“We’ll be able to do systems-scale science in Antarctica. That wasn’t possible before,” said Wilson, associate professor of earth sciences at Ohio State. “This instrumentation is designed to run and record data year-round, through the dark polar night. Previous instrument deployments have largely operated only for a few months, or less, each year. This allows us to do new science.”

The first expeditions for POLENET began arriving in early December, and by the end of February 2008 the POLENET scientists plan to have 17 new GPS trackers installed across the WAIS, along with about 11 new seismic sensors. By 2010 the network will be complete, and will hopefully record data well in to 2012.

International Polar Year Newswire - Scientists to Monitor West Antarctica 24/7