I
will be adding more to this later on
The
latest from the Arctic and Antarctica
Arctic
sea ice volume is down from 2nd lowest to lowest on record.
For
the geeks, these are the best figures we get for daily ice.
Daily
volume: 6,472 km³ (*record* low for the date) Δ +54/day
+599/week,
1,363/month, –62/year, –75/5year (–1.1%)
–10,805
(–63% 80s), –9,188 (90s), –5,184 (00s), –1,447 (2010–16)
Daily
extent: 7,974,795 km² (3rd lowest for the date) Δ +42k/day
+567k/week,
2,835k/month, +941k/year, +235k/5year (+3%)
2017
volume maximum 20,756 km³ on April 18th (*lowest*)
2017
volume minimum 4,539 km³ on September 11th (4th lowest)
2017
extent maximum 13,878,287 km² on March 6th (*lowest*)
2017
extent minimum 4,472,225 km² on September 9th (6th lowest)
However,
the above daily numbers carry a taste of 🍒. If you don’t
want to cherry–pick your data to make a point, you may want to look
at the latest, updated, running annual average. The ice, after all,
has to be out there and survive those waves 24/7, 365 days of the
year.
Annual
volume: 12,595 km³ (*record* low) Δ –0.2/day
–2.3/week,
+11/month, –1,424/year, –1,073/5year (–7.8%)
Annual
extent: 9,869,665 km² (2nd lowest) Δ +2.58k/day
+18k/week,
+58k/month, +23k/year, –128k/5year (–1.3%)
Source:
JAXA / PIOMAS (app estimate) for November 1st 2017.
Barrow,
Alaska – 02 November, 2017
Where's the early-winter ice?
This
image has been recorded by a web cam overlooking the landfast ice (or
coastal ocean during the ice-free period in summer) from atop the
bank building in downtown Barrow, Alaska. The camera is looking
approximately North.
Apart
from providing a visual impression of the sea-ice conditions off
Barrow, these images establish a longer-term record of key dates in
the seasonal evolution of the sea-ice cover, such as: onset of fall
ice formation, formation of a stable ice cover, onset of spring melt,
appearance of melt ponds, beginning of ice break-up in early summer,
removal or advection of sea ice during the summer months.
Scientists can't explain a 'worrying' rise in methane levels
Yahoo Finance
1 November, 2017
The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere reached a record high in 2016, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Thanks to a combination of human activities and the El Nino weather event, last year's increase was 50% higher than the yearly average from the past decade, driving CO2 to a level that's not been seen for 800,000 years. Average levels in 2016 reached 403.3 parts per million, up from 400 parts per million in 2015.
The
WMO's report also points to a mysterious rise in the levels
of methane in
the atmosphere, which were also higher than the 10-year average.
Speaking to BBC
News,
Professor Euan Nisbet from Royal Holloway University of London said
this was not expected in the Paris Agreement. "We do not
understand why methane is rising ... It is very worrying."
Unsurprisingly,
scientists say the figures make current climate targets unachievable.
"Without rapid cuts in CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions,
we will be heading for dangerous temperature increases by the end of
this century, well above the target set by the Paris Climate Change
Agreement," said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas. "Future
generations will inherit a much more inhospitable planet."
Donald
Trump might be about to make a decision that would make the situation
'even bleaker', the report warns
There is a "catastrophic"
gap between what needs to be done on climate change and what
governments and companies are actually doing, the UN has warned.
Despite pledges to work to
mitigate and deal with climate change, current plans still lead to
a 3-degree Celsius rise in temperatures by the end of the decade,
a major new report warns. If that happens, it will not only break
through the 2-degrees target set in the Paris agreement, but also
lead to deadly changes in the climate across the world.
In its latest "Emissions
Gap" report issued ahead of an important climate conference in
Germany next week, the program takes aim at coal-fired electricity
plants being built in developing economies and says investment in
renewable energies will pay for itself — and even make money —
over the long term.
Totten glacier, the largest in
East Antarctica, is being melted from below by warm water that
reaches the ice.
Up until now it wasn’t
entirely clear what was pushing this warm water towards the glacier
however a research team at the University of Texas has made the
worrying discovery that it is in fact intense winds that are to
blame.
While in the past this
wouldn’t be as much of a problem, climate change is expected to see
the intensity of these winds increase significantly in the future.
That turns it into a very big
problem because Totten just so happens to contain enough ice to raise
the global sea level by a staggering 11 feet. It’s also considered
the plug that locks in the ice of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet.
“Totten has been called the
sleeping giant because it’s huge and has been seen as insensitive
to changes in its environment,” said lead author Chad Greene, a
Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics
(UTIG).
“But we’ve shown that if
Totten is asleep, it’s certainly not in a coma ― we’re seeing
signs of responsiveness, and it might just take the wind blowing to
wake it up.”
The team discovered that the
glacier speeds up its flow towards the sea when winds over
Antarctica’s southern ocean are particularly strong.
What happens is that the wind
pulls warm water up from the deep ocean and onto the continental
shelf in a process that’s called upwelling.
Once the warm water reaches
the coast it then starts to circulate under the floating ice portion
of the glacier and in turn cause it to melt into the sea.
“It’s like when you blow
across a hot bowl of soup and little bits of noodles from the bottom
begin to swirl around and rise to the top,” said Greene.
The reason Totten is a cause
for such concern is because of the fact that much of the ice that
would be melting would be land-locked, so ice that traditionally
would never have entered the ocean. Of course climate change is
changing that.
“Ice sheet sensitivity to
wind forcing has been hypothesised for a long time, but it takes
decades of observation to show unequivocal cause and effect,” said
Donald Blankenship, a senior researcher at UTIG who contributed to
this study and Roberts’ study.
“Now we’re at the point
where we can explicitly show the links between what happens in the
atmosphere, what happens in the ocean, and what happens to the
Antarctic Ice Sheet.”
Companies
are trying to 'have their oil and drink it' by committing to 2°C in
public while planning for much higher temperature rises, says
shareholder campaign group, ShareAction
Oil
giants Shell and BP are planning for global temperatures to rise as
much as 5°C by the middle of the century. The level is more than
double the upper limit committed to by most countries in the world
under the Paris Climate Agreement, which both companies publicly
support.
The
discrepancy demonstrates that the companies are keeping shareholders
in the dark about the risks posed to their businesses by climate
change, according to two new reports published by investment campaign
group Share Action. Many climate scientists say that a temperature
rise of 5°C would be catastrophic for the planet.
ShareAction
claims that the companies’ actions put the value of millions of
people's pensions at risk. Two years after BP and Shell shareholders
voted resoundingly in favour of forcing the companies to make
detailed disclosures about climate risks, the companies have made
unconvincing steps forward, according to the reports.
ShareAction
said that Shell and BP are meeting their legal requirements, but are
putting shareholders’ capital at risk because of numerous failings
in their plans for the future.
Neither
company sets targets to reduce emissions and BP’s total investment
in renewable and clean technologies has actually shrunk since 2005,
the reports said. That’s despite the company’s public-facing
image of being “beyond petroleum”.
BP
invests just 1.3 per cent of its total capital expenditure in
low-carbon projects while Shell has pledged to invest 3 per cent of
its annual spend on low-carbon by 2020.
Both
companies assess the resilience of their businesses against climate
models in which temperatures warm by between 3°C and 5°C.
A
maximum warming of 2°C beyond pre-industrial levels is the central
aim of the landmark Paris climate agreement, which both firms say
they support. It is widely believed that any warming beyond 2°C
could cause serious and potentially irreversible changes to the
climate.
Shell
reaffirmed its commitment to the Paris Agreement in a statement
publicising its most recent AGM. “Shell has a clear strategy,
resilient in a 2°C world,” the company said, but its change
modelling document states that “the emissions pathways until the
middle of the century overshoots the trajectory of a 2°C goal”.
ShareAction’s
report also found that top executives at both Shell and BP are still
given incentives to pursue strategies centred on oil and gas and are
paid bonuses over three to six years for fossil fuel projects that
could have damaging effects for shareholders decades later.
Michael
Chaitow, senior campaigns officer at ShareAction, said the report
revealed an “uncomfortable discrepancy” between Shell and BP’s
public support for a low-carbon economy and their actual business
planning.
“Shell
and BP want to have their oil and drink it too, by advocating for the
landmark Paris Agreement to limit global temperature rises to below
2°C degrees, while planning for scenarios that would violate it,”
he said.
The
group called on Shell and BP shareholders, which include powerful
institutional investors, to demand that the two oil companies do more
to tackle climate change.
In
2015, more than 98 per cent of shareholders in both Shell and BP
voted for resolutions that require the companies to regularly report
on their emissions, resilience to climate change, investment in
low-carbon technology and executive incentives.
The
resolutions helped pave the way for subsequent shareholder
resolutions on climate-related disclosure at oil and gas companies
including Exxon and Occidental Petroleum.
Following
the Shell and BP resolutions, billionaire businessman and former New
York Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, founded a task force to press
companies to properly disclose to the world the risks that climate
change presents.
Catherine
Howarth, chief executive of ShareAction, said the chief executives of
both Shell and BP are running companies that look “poorly prepared
for the speed of technological and economic change now underway in
the global energy market”.
She
added: “Millions of pension savers are exposed to Shell and BP’s
shares. These reports challenge the professional investors looking
after our pension savings to manage the growing financial risks
facing BP and Shell more actively in the coming year.”
Neither
BP nor Shell would comment on the report directly. BP said it
“anticipates a range of scenarios to give us flexibility in our
approach".
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