The Climate Changing in UK

The first comprehensive report from the government into the potential effects of climate change has indicated both risks and opportunities for the UK.

On the one hand, flooding, heatwaves and water shortages are likely, but better shipping lanes through the Arctic, higher crop yields, and fewer cold-related deaths in the winter are potential benefits.

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The 2,000-page report has been in the works for three years and was prepared by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. It considers multiple climate change scenarios based on computer modelling that consider how 11 different areas of British life, including agriculture and transport, might react to different levels of global emissions cuts.

Assuming nothing is done in preparation, negative outcomes include between 580 and 5,900 deaths above the average per year by the 2050s, and water shortages in the north, south and east of England (and particularly in the Thames Valley area) and between £2.1 billion and £12 billion more damage from flooding by the 2080s.

On the other hand, shorter shipping routes to Asia would be opened up by melting Arctic sea ice, and milder winters should mean both 3,900 to 24,000 fewer premature deaths from cold-related causes and longer growing seasons yielding 40 to 140 percent greater wheat yields and 20 to 70 percent greater sugar beet yields.

Environment secretary Caroline Spelman said: "It shows what life could be like if we stopped our preparations now, and the consequences such a decision would mean for our economic stability."

My Car Runs on Coffee

An unassuming-looking old car powered not by gas, but by coffee, recently broke the land speed record for a vehicle powered by gasification, clocking in at a cool 66.5 miles per hour on average. Gasification works by introducing oxygen or steam to an organic, carbon-based material (such as coffee beans, in this case) and increasing the temperature until a synthetic gas made of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, hydrogen and methane is created and burned up by a regular internal combustion engine.

Environment-Clean-Generations

 The Coffee Car, originally built by British engineers for the BBC show Bang Goes the Theory, already holds a world record, for longest journey by a coffee-powered car (over 200 miles), and now the second generation has proven itself on the speed front as well. The previous record, held by Americans, was just 47 mph, and the car was fueled by wood chips. In this case, it looks like coffee, the same sweet nectar that gives so many working men and women around the world the energy to go the distance, has proven superior once again.

Get acquainted with the Coffee Car in the video below, or check out the record-breaking drive over at the BBC.

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Sea Levels Rising for 500 Years?

Rising sea levels in the coming centuries is perhaps one of the most catastrophic consequences of rising temperatures. Massive economic costs, social consequences and forced migrations could result from global warming. But how frightening of times are we facing? Researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute are part of a team that has calculated the long-term outlook for rising sea levels in relation to the emission of greenhouse gases and pollution of the atmosphere using climate models.

The results have been published in the scientific journal Global and Planetary Change.

"Based on the current situation we have projected changes in sea level 500 years into the future. We are not looking at what is happening with the climate, but are focusing exclusively on sea levels," explains Aslak Grinsted, a researcher at the Centre for Ice and Climate, the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen.

Model based on actual measurements

He has developed a model in collaboration with researchers from England and China that is based on what happens with the emission of greenhouse gases and aerosols and the pollution of the atmosphere. Their model has been adjusted backwards to the actual measurements and was then used to predict the outlook for rising sea levels.

The research group has made calculations for four scenarios: a pessimistic one, an optimistic one, and two more realistic ones.

In the pessimistic scenario, emissions continue to increase. This will mean that sea levels will rise 1.1 meters by the year 2100 and will have risen 5.5 meters by the year 2500.

Even in the most optimistic scenario, which requires extremely dramatic climate change goals, major technological advances and strong international cooperation to stop emitting greenhouse gases and polluting the atmosphere, the sea would continue to rise. By the year 2100 it will have risen by 60 cm and by the year 2500 the rise in sea level will be 1.8 meters.

For the two more realistic scenarios, calculated based on the emissions and pollution stabilizing, the results show that there will be a sea level rise of about 75 cm by the year 2100 and that by the year 2500 the sea will have risen by 2 meters.

Rising sea levels for centuries

"In the 20th century sea has risen by an average of 2mm per year, but it is accelerating and over the last decades the rise in sea level has gone approximately 70% faster. Even if we stabilize the concentrations in the atmosphere and stop emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, we can see that the rise in sea level will continue to accelerate for several centuries because of the sea and ice caps long reaction time. So it would be 2-400 years before we returned to the 20th century level of a 2 mm rise per year," says Aslak Grinsted.

He points out that even though long-term calculations are subject to uncertainties, the sea will continue to rise in the coming centuries and it will most likely rise by 75 cm by the year 2100 and by the year 2500 the sea will have risen by 2 meters.

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Irrigation Might Raise Sea Level

Ocean levels have risen several inches over the last century, and that's only likely to increase going forward. Most of that is related to climate change — but now scientists may have discovered a hidden factor in all this: irrigation. 

At first glance, that might seem surprising. After all, irrigation is just moving water from one area to another, to allow people to live in naturally dry or arid areas. The problem is that not all irrigation comes from water already on the surface - a lot of it is now extracted from deep underground, introducing tons of extra water that would not otherwise be a part of the planet's water cycle.

Researchers from the US Geological Survey calculated that the last century saw over a thousand cubic miles worth of water extracted from underground and used for irrigation purposes. 

That was enough water to boost ocean levels by about half an inch, accounting for 12.6% of the total sea level rise in the 20th century.

And all this isn't likely to stop anytime soon. Ground water extraction has skyrocketed in the last decade, with some estimates say we're now bringing up about 34 cubic miles each year. That's enough to increase sea levels by .016 inches each year, which is 13% of the current rise. 

While melting ice and other climate-related factors remain responsible for the vast majority of the sea level increase, this adds a new wrinkle to how we use irrigation and ground water going forward.

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Can We Count On Weather Machines?

An NAS workshop looks to offset the effects of global warming with intensive, large-scale engineering projects to intentionally alter the climate. Does anyone think this is a good idea?

Ever since prehistoric man first set fires to drive game towards hunters and cliffs, humans have altered their environment for their own gain. No more so than in the years since the Industrial Revolution, when carbon emissions began to drastically alter Earth's climate and atmosphere.

And now that we know definitively that humans can alter Earth's climate, some scientists have begun investigating ways to deliberately change the weather to offset the negative impact of a century of inadvertent human generated climate change.

 

The name for that deliberate, targeted climate change is geoengineering, and its on the mind of everyone from the National Academy of Sciences to Barack Obama's science adviser.

On Monday, the National Academy of Sciences held a workshop on geoengineering, following an interview where White House Science Adviser John Holdren recommended increased research into the subject. While the scientists at the workshop agreed that it was possible, there was disagreement about when to start testing the ideas, and whether or not the cure might be worse than the problem.

According to National Public Radio, one of the more popular ideas involves seeding the sky with sulfur particulate to reflect the rays of the sun and cool the Earth. This solution mimics the changes in climate that follow large volcanic eruptions. In a recent article, The Atlantic Monthly deemed this the "Blade Runner scenario," and listed some other possible geoengineering schemes, including pouring huge amounts of iron into the ocean to encourage carbon-absorbing algae blooms and using a fleet of 1,500 ships to churn up seawater to create more light reflecting clouds.

As Matt Springer at ScienceBlogs notes, no one is sure if any of these plans will work, if geoengineering is even legal, or what unintended nightmare consequences may result from wholesale disruption of the Earth's carefully balanced ecosystem.

The global warming that results from man-made carbon emissions has shown that we can profoundly alter the climate. But the scientists interviewed in all those articles seem torn by the question of whether or not more human generate change is the appropriate, cheapest, and safest way to address the climate problem.

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When The Sun Heats Up Earth Cools?

The Earthly impact of the Sun's 11-year solar cycle has always seemed like one of the more reliable and straightforward elements in the vast array of climate variables. On the rise, solar radiation increases and so warms the planet a little -- the thinking goes -- and on the way down a subtle cooling takes place.

Now, a new piece of research argues that's not necessarily so. Looking inside at the individual wavelengths of solar radiance as measured by a satellite-borne device called the Spectral Irradiance Monitor, scientists report that in their study of these measurements during the declining phase of the solar cycle between 2004 and 2007, the opposite pattern emerges.

Reporting in the journal Nature, scientists from the University of Colorado and Imperial College London say that the amount of visible radiation reaching Earth actually increased rather than decreased during this period of solar cycle decline, slightly warming rather than cooling the planet.

With these findings in hand, the researchers observe that the overall increase in solar activity during the past century may have led to a small cooling effect from the Sun, rather than a warming effect as previously thought.

Physicist Joanna Haigh of Imperial College, lead author of the study, cautioned:

"We cannot jump to any conclusions based on what we have found during this comparatively short period and we need to carry out further studies to explore the Sun's activity, and the patterns that we have uncovered, on longer timescales. However, if further studies find the same pattern over a longer period of time, this could suggest that we may have overestimated the Sun's role in warming the planet, rather than underestimating it."

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Clouds Can Make Warming Worse

Researchers are making headway against one of the most deceptively difficult problems in climate science: What happens to clouds in a warming world? Are there more, or fewer, and do they make matters better or worse?

A team of University of Hawaii-Manoa researchers from the U.S. and Japan report that a regional atmospheric model has achieved a breakthrough in the depiction of the impact of warming temperatures on cloudiness in the eastern Pacific Ocean, something that large global climate models have failed to accomplish.

It doesn't qualify as a dramatic Eureka! moment, but in climate science, progress on this front is a big deal, because this failure of the large, supercomputer-driven global climate models to accurately capture the role of clouds in our changing climate is a major source of uncertainty in their forecasts.

"All the global climate models we analyzed have serious deficiencies in simulating the properties of clouds in present-day climate," said lead author Axel Lauer in a statement released by UHM. "It is unfortunate that the global models' greatest weakness may be in the one aspect that is most critical for predicting the magnitude of global warming."

Unfortunately, the news from the University of Hawaii team, reporting in the Journal of Climate, apparently confirms earlier estimates that the response of clouds to rising sea surface temperatures amplifies the warming trend, leading scientists to suggest that our future lies at the warmer high end of the spread of model uncertainty rather than the cooler low end.

Higher sea surface temperatures cause low-level marine clouds to dissipate, the thinking goes, allowing more of the sun's warming rays to break through, causing a further rise in ocean temperatures. . . and so on.

In the same stretch of the eastern North Pacific, similar "positive feedback" results were reported last summer by a team led by Amy Clement of the University of Miami, who compared observations made by sailors with measurements taken by satellite-borne instruments, but is the first report of a model successfully capturing the effect.

"If our model results prove to be representative of the real global climate, then climate is actually more sensitive to perturbations by greenhouse gases than current global models predict, and even the highest warming predictions would underestimate the real change we could see," said co-author Kevin Hamilton.

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