Ocean News

Fukushima radiation has reached U.S. shores https://www.statesmanjournal.com/story/tech/science/environment/2016/12/07/fukushima-radiation-has-reached-us-shores/95045692/

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Ice-free Arctic summers could hinge on small climate warming range | Science Daily

The findings, which were published in the journal Nature Climate Change, show that limiting warming to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) would reduce the likelihood of an ice-free Arctic summer to 30 percent by the year 2100, whereas warming by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) would make at least one ice-free summer certain.

"I didn't expect to find that half a degree Celsius would make a big difference, but it really does," said Alexandra Jahn, author of the study and an assistant professor in CU Boulder's Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences and a fellow in the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR). "At 1.5 degrees Celsius, half of the time we stay within our current summer sea ice regime whereas if we reach 2 degrees of warming, the summer sea ice area will always be below what we have experienced in recent decades."

 

Global warming to date could ‘obliterate’ a third of glacier ice | Eco Business

The warming the world has already experienced could be enough to melt more than a third of the world’s glaciers outside Antarctica and Greenland – regardless of current efforts to reduce emissions.

That is the stark conclusion of a new study, which analyses the lag between global temperature rise and the retreat of glaciers. The relatively slow response of glaciers to global warming means it will take to the end of the century – and beyond – to see the benefits of mitigation efforts in the coming decades.

 

That doesn't bode well. It seems in the West we're at the end of a relatively long term plan to convert people to short term thinking.

 

Rising Levels of Carbon Dioxide Causing Fish to Lose Their Sense of Smell | Telesur

The carbon dioxide when absorbed by seawater, forms carbonic acid which is responsible for making the water more acidic. According to the research, fish use their "sense of smell (olfaction) to find food, safe habitats, avoid predators, recognize each other and find suitable spawning grounds" but a reduction in their ability to smell is adversely affecting these essential functions necessary for their survival.

The new study states that several economically important species will be affected by the elevated levels of CO2. The sense of smell of sea bass was reduced by up to half in seawater that was acidified with a level of CO2 predicted for the end of the century.

 

Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change | New York Times

[warning: very long article]​

Thirty years ago, we had a chance to save the planet.

 

China could face deadly heat waves due to climate change | MIT News

A region that holds one of the biggest concentrations of people on Earth could be pushing against the boundaries of habitability by the latter part of this century, a new study shows.

Research has shown that beyond a certain threshold of temperature and humidity, a person cannot survive unprotected in the open for extended periods — as, for example, farmers must do. Now, a new MIT study shows that unless drastic measures are taken to limit climate-changing emissions, China’s most populous and agriculturally important region could face such deadly conditions repeatedly, suffering the most damaging heat effects, at least as far as human life is concerned, of any place on the planet.

The study shows that the risk of deadly heat waves is significantly increased because of intensive irrigation in this relatively dry but highly fertile region, known as the North China Plain — a region whose role in that country is comparable to that of the Midwest in the U.S. That increased vulnerability to heat arises because the irrigation exposes more water to evaporation, leading to higher humidity in the air than would otherwise be present and exacerbating the physiological stresses of the temperature.

 

Heat waves could kill farmers within six hours in parts of China https://www.newsweek.com/failing-crops-death-humidity-and-mass-migration-how-heatwaves-could-soon-make-1056231

Another remake of "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" ?

 

On August 1, we'll have consumed more resources than the Earth can regenerate in a year | Insider

• Earth Overshoot Day is the day each year when humans have consumed a year's worth of the planet's natural resources. In 2018, it falls on August 1.
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• The Country Overshoot Day for the US is much earlier: March 15, 2018. If everyone lived like US residents, we would need five earths to meet our annual consumption.
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• Want to reduce your ecological footprint ? Changing the way you get around and the food you eat can have the biggest impact.

 

The Planet Is Dangerously Close to the Tipping Point for a 'Hothouse Earth' | Live Science

 

Climate change-driven droughts are getting hotter, UCI study finds | University of California, Irving

In a study published today in Science Advances, researchers at the University of California, Irvine report that temperatures during droughts have been rising faster than in average climates in recent decades, and they point to concurrent changes in atmospheric water vapor as a driver of the surge.

“Available soil moisture can remove surface heat through evaporation, but if the land is dry, there is no opportunity to transport it away, which increases the local temperature,” said lead author Felicia Chiang, a UCI graduate student in civil & environmental engineering. “Atmospheric conditions can influence soil, and we argue that they’re shaping the temperatures we experience during droughts.”

 

Blocking sunlight to cool Earth won’t reduce crop damage from global warming | University of California, Berkeley

Injecting particles into the atmosphere to cool the planet and counter the warming effects of climate change would do nothing to offset the crop damage from rising global temperatures, according to a new analysis by University of California, Berkeley, researchers.

By analyzing the past effects of Earth-cooling volcanic eruptions, and the response of crops to changes in sunlight, the team concluded that any improvements in yield from cooler temperatures would be negated by lower productivity due to reduced sunlight. The findings have important implications for our understanding of solar geoengineering, one proposed method for helping humanity manage the impacts of global warming.

 

Earth's Soil Is Hyperventilating Thanks To Climate Change | Live Science

• There's about twice as much carbon dioxide stored in Earth's soil as there is floating around the atmosphere.

• Microbes gorge on the carbon stored in plant matter, and then release carbon dioxide as a natural byproduct of this feeding

• As global temperatures rise, microbes in the soil have been releasing CO2 faster than plants can snatch it up again.

• The rate of CO2 released from Earth's soil has increased globally by about 1.2 percent in just 25 years.

• It's possible that all that extra CO2 will feed a self-intensifying loop of atmospheric warming and soil respiration over the years to come.

The study is published in the journal Nature.

 

Forests crucial for limiting climate change to 1.5 degrees | Science Daily

• Biomass Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) power stations produce energy by burning biomass crops and then storing the CO2 produced underground.
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• A study published in Nature has concluded that BECCS could instead increase the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere if the crops are assumed to replace existing forests.
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• How well BECCS works depends on factors such as the choice of biomass, the fate of initial above-ground biomass and the fossil-fuel emissions offset in the energy system.

 

I saw a video of interviews at a recent WASP political rally and an older woman wound up about climate change, her argument was not necessarily that it was a hoax but it was 80 years in the future and nobody would be alive by then.