Ocean News

Where America's Climate Migrants Will Go As Sea Level Rises

13 million U.S. coastal residents are expected to be displaced by 2100 due to sea level rise. Researchers are starting to predict where they’ll go.


Blue indicates counties where flooding will displace residents if sea levels rise by six feet by 2100. Counties in shades of pink and red will see higher-than-average migration, with the darker shades representing larger population increases. (PLOS One)

 

Unprecedented data confirms that Antarctica’s most dangerous glacier is melting from below

 

We've Vastly Underestimated How Much Methane Humans Are Spewing Into The Atmosphere

Tiny bubbles of ancient air trapped in ice cores from Greenland suggest we've been seriously overestimating the natural cycle of methane, while vastly undervaluing our own terrible impact.......

Until about 1870, the findings suggest very low levels of methane were emitted into the atmosphere and almost all of it was biological in nature. Only after this date was there a sharp increase in methane, coinciding with an increase in fossil fuel use......

In practice this means that each year, the scientific community has been underestimating methane emissions from humans by as little as 25 percent and as high as 40 percent......

 

Warming, acidic oceans may nearly eliminate coral reef habitats by 2100

Scientists project 70 to 90 percent of coral reefs will disappear over the next 20 years as a result of climate change and pollution. Some groups are attempting to curb this decline by transplanting live corals grown in a lab to dying reefs. They propose new, young corals will boost the reef's recovery and bring it back to a healthy state.

But new research mapping where such restoration efforts would be most successful over the coming decades finds that by 2100, few to zero suitable coral habitats will remain. The preliminary findings suggest sea surface temperature and acidity are the most important factors in determining if a site is suitable for restoration.

 

Patterns of thinning of Antarctica's biggest glacier are opposite to previously observed

Using the latest satellite technology from the European Space Agency (ESA), scientists from the University of Bristol have been tracking patterns of mass loss from Pine Island—Antarctica's largest glacier. They found that the pattern of thinning is evolving in complex ways both in space and time with thinning rates now highest along the slow-flow margins of the glacier, while rates in the fast-flowing central trunk have decreased by about a factor of five since 2007. This is the opposite of what was observed prior to 2010....

The results of the new study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, suggest that rapid migration of the grounding line, the place where the grounded ice first meets the ocean, is unlikely over that timescale, without a major change in ocean forcing. Instead, the results support model simulations that imply that the glacier will continue to lose mass but not at much greater rates than present......

 

Paper That Blames The Sun For Climate Change Was Just Retracted From Major Journal

........The paper, titled "Oscillations of the baseline of solar magnetic field and solar irradiance on a millennial timescale," led by mathematician Valentina Zharkova of Northumbria University in the UK, was published in June 2019.

It claimed that human activity was not to blame for the roughly one degree rise in global temperatures since the Industrial Revolution, and therefore we can avoid culpability for the shockingly fast upward trend of global temperatures having devastating effects on communities and ecosystems around the world.

Instead, the paper claimed that rising temperatures were due to the changing distance between Earth and the Sun, because of the way the Sun moves around........

In the now-retracted paper, Zharkova et al. contended that the motion of the Sun around the barycentres created by the gas giants was enough to alter the distance between Earth and Sun by up to 3 million kilometres (1.85 million miles), over a timeframe of a few hundred years.

But, as other scientists were quick to point out on PubPeer, Earth doesn't orbit those barycentres. It orbits the Sun. So its average distance from the Sun remains pretty constant on small timescales..........

 

JP Morgan economists warn of 'catastrophic' climate change

 

'Time is fast running out': World Meteorological Organization warns climate efforts are falling short

WMO Statement on the State of the Global Climate in 2019

 

Greenland, Antarctica Melting Six Times Faster Than in the 1990s

Observations from 11 satellite missions monitoring the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have revealed that the regions are losing ice six times faster than they were in the 1990s. If the current melting trend continues, the regions will be on track to match the "worst-case" scenario of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of an extra 6.7 inches (17 centimeters) of sea level rise by 2100......

The resulting meltwater boosted global sea levels by 0.7 inches (17.8 millimeters). Together, the melting polar ice sheets are responsible for a third of all sea level rise. Of this total sea level rise, 60% resulted from Greenland's ice loss and 40% resulted from Antarctica's.......

The IPCC in its Fifth Assessment Report issued in 2014 predicted global sea levels would rise 28 inches (71 centimeters) by 2100. The Ice Sheet Mass Balance Intercomparison Exercise team's studies show that ice loss from Antarctica and Greenland tracks with the IPCC's worst-case scenario........

 

Antarctic glacier retreated 3 miles in 22 years, threatening global sea-level rise
For more detailed information see also: Scientists just discovered a massive new vulnerability in the Antarctic ice sheet

 

The Great Barrier Reef likely just experienced its most widespread bleaching event on record

 

Climate change: The rich are to blame, international study finds

 

A Security Threat Assessment of Global Climate Change

......The panel, made up of national security, military and intelligence experts, analyzed the globe through the lens of the U.S. Geographic Combatant Commands, and concluded that:

“Even at scenarios of low warming, each region of the world will face severe risks to national and global security in the next three decades. Higher levels of warming will pose catastrophic, and likely irreversible, global security risks over the course of the 21st century.”.......

Key recommendations

1. Mitigating these risks requires quickly reducing and phasing out global greenhouse gas emissions. We call for the world to achieve net-zero global emissions as soon as possible in a manner that is ambitious, safe, equitable, and well-governed, in order to avoid severe and catastrophic security futures.
2. The world must also “climate-proof” environments, infrastructure, institutions, and systems on which human security depends, and so we call for rapidly building resilience to current and expected impacts of climate change. With future-oriented investments in adaptation, disaster response, and peacebuilding
3. In the United States, we call for renewed efforts to prioritize, communicate, and respond to climate security threats, and to integrate these considerations across all security planning.

 

North Atlantic's capacity to absorb CO2 overestimated, study suggests

 

A climate change double whammy in the US Corn Belt

The United States Corn Belt includes western Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, eastern Nebraska, and eastern Kansas. The region has dominated corn production in the U.S. since the 1850s, accounting for more than a third of the global supply of corn. It is also the world's largest source of soybeans. New research led by atmospheric scientist Mingfang Ting from Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory reveals that climate change has triggered two changes that threaten the region's crop production; warming temperatures are both increasing the evaporation of soil moisture and causing summer storms to carry more moisture away from the Midwest. Ting's study, which she presented last week at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union, forecasts a progressive worsening of this one-two punch over the next decade......