At the bottom of the Baltic Sea, history sits largely intact. Because shipworms don’t care for these cold, low-salt waters, shipwrecks can endure for centuries without great decay. The Vasa, a famous Swedish warship that sank in Stockholm harbor in 1628, was in terrific condition when engineers raised it from the depths more than 300 years later. But, scientists now warn, those conditions could be coming to an end due to global warming.
Shipworms, which can obliterate a wreck in ten years, have already attacked about a hundred sunken vessels dating back to the 13th century in Baltic waters off Germany, Denmark, and Sweden, reported study co-author Christin Appelqvist [National Geographic News]. Now, Appelqvist says, their range is beginning to extend beyond those areas into the northern part of the Baltic. That could threaten close to 100,000 shipwrecks scattered across the bottom of the sea.
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Just when the whole “ClimateGate” affair had retreated from the headlines, other climate scientists have stepped in to shoot themselves in the foot in the public spotlight. In a new slow-simmering controversy that reached major news outlets this week, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) chief Rajendra Pachauri admitted that one of the details in the 2007 report was a mistake. Though the goof is a minor one (in that it doesn’t change the conclusion of the report), the backlash probably won’t be, given what happened the last time around.
Specifically, one part of the report states that the Himalayan glaciers are retreating faster than anywhere else in the world, and that there’s a good chance they could totally disappear by 2035. But while it’s true that the glaciers are retreating, the date given is a gross overstatement. “You just can’t accomplish it,” says Jeffrey Kargel from the University of Arizona. “If you think about the thicknesses of the ice – 200-300m thicknesses, in some cases up to 400m thick – and if you’re losing ice at the rate of a metre a year, or let’s say double it to two metres a year, you’re not going to get rid of 200m of ice in a quarter of a century” [BBC News].
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When the Copenhagen climate summit ended in disappointment and finger-pointing, we saw again just how difficult it would be to get the world’s nations on board for an agreement to lower greenhouse emissions and slow global warming. This week brings another reminder of how far away we are from meaningful action: We can’t even get past the difference between weather and climate.
It’s bitter cold this week, even for January. Beijing had its coldest morning in almost 40 years and its biggest snowfall since 1951. Britain is suffering through its longest cold snap since 1981 [AP]. The southern United States is in the grip of freezing weather; the Midwest has seen dangerously cold wind chills far below zero. Trying to stave off the inevitable “where’s your global warming now” chants, the AP and other news sources rushed to run pieces trying to get across—one more time—that weather isn’t climate. The chants came, inevitably. But despite pundits and columnists who try to conflate the two to take the same old swings at global warming, a single bout of cold weather—or hot, for that matter—doesn’t actually say diddly squat about long-term climate patterns.
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Much to the chagrin of a certain Wyoming Senator, the Central Intelligence Agency is poised to fight terrorism and spy on sea lions (Sen. John Barrasso once quipped the CIA should stick to the former occupation). The nation’s top scientists and spies are collaborating on an effort to use the federal government’s intelligence assets — including spy satellites and other classified sensors — to assess the hidden complexities of environmental change. They seek insights from natural phenomena like clouds and glaciers, deserts and tropical forests [The New York Times].
The program will have little impact on the CIA’s normal intelligence gathering, say those involved, and will only release data already in hand or data gathered during satellite down time. The images will even have their sharpness decreased in order to maintain some secrecy about the satellites’ true capabilities.
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Chalk up another unexpected consequence of pumping too much carbon dioxide into the air: According to a new study, the excess CO2 that ends up in seawater is gradually making the oceans noisier.
The changing chemistry of the ocean is one of the major impacts of CO2 emissions. The dissolved gas is changing the pH of the water by making it more acidic, which makes life harder for corals and marine critters with calcium carbonate shells that are corroded by the acidic water. But the new study, published in Nature Geoscience, found that changing the pH of the oceans also reduces the levels of chemicals that absorb sound, like magnesium sulphate and boric acid.
Low-frequency sound in the ocean is produced by natural phenomena such as rain, waves and marine life, and by human activities such as sonar systems, shipping and construction. The sound is absorbed mainly through the viscosity of the water and the presence of certain dissolved chemicals…. But the concentration of chemicals that absorb sound in the oceans has declined as a result of ocean acidification [AFP]. The study found that sound absorption could fall by some 60 percent in high latitudes and deep waters by 2100.
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Let the Copenhagen fallout continue.
Friday night, after a two-week diplomacy fest that could be called “difficult” at best, leaders of some of the most powerful countries in the world announced that they reached an 11th hour agreement to conclude the United Nations Copenhagen climate summit. After speaking to the assembly, President Barack Obama spent the day going in and out of meetings with Chinese prime minister Wen Jiabao. They met later with Mammoghan Singh of India, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, and South African President Jacob Zuma, before a White House official leaked that these big players had reached an agreement.
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Things are getting a tad testy in Denmark as the Copenhagen climate summit lurches toward its conclusion tomorrow. Contrary to rumors that he would skip the event because of the growing pessimism about reaching an agreement, President Barack Obama says today that he’s on his way for the conference’s decisive day.
Yesterday was protest day, as 4,000 people marched around the Bella center and police arrested 260. Activists tried a variety of methods to enter the conference centre, approaching in large groups from several directions and, at one point, sending several hundred people running with seven giant lilos [air mattresses] to bridge a moat next to the centre [The Guardian].
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Google.org, the non-profit division of the search engine giant Google, wants to help scientists monitor deforestation by harnessing the power of its popular Google Earth and Maps applications. Its new “high-performance satellite imagery-processing engine” can process terabytes of information on thousands of Google servers while giving access to the results online. The platform, which was demonstrated on Thursday at the International Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, would allow anyone using the tool to monitor whether or not trees were being chopped down in a given forest. It analyzes satellite images to show forest changes over a given time period [CNET].
The announcement comes at a time when delegates from around the world are attempting to negotiate a treaty to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Google debuted their new program at Copenhagen because they are hoping that their software could help countries conform to the REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries) program proposed by the United Nations, in which industrialized nations would pay developing nations to keep their forests standing.
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After hacked e-mails, angry Copenhagen sex workers, and months of lead-up time with which to question whether the leaders of the world will actually do anything to slow down global warming, the big meeting is finally here. Today marks day one of the U.N. climate summit held in Denmark’s capital, in which diplomats from 192 nations, including more than 100 heads of state, will try to iron out some kind of agreement that would be the successor to the Kyoto protocols.
The conference opened with videos about the consequences of climate change; the big decisions won’t come for a few days. President Barack Obama‘s decision to attend the end of the conference, not the middle, was taken as a signal that an agreement was getting closer…. The first week of the conference will focus on refining the complex text of a draft treaty. But major decisions will await the arrival next week of environment ministers and the heads of state in the final days of the conference, which ends Dec. 18 [AP].
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Scientists have argued before that controlling the earth’s burgeoning population would be one of the most effective ways to slow global warming, since keeping millions of little consumers from being born would reduce the amount of fossil fuel that would have to be burned to keep them warm and fed and happy. Now, an advocacy group that focuses on overpopulation is taking the argument the next step, suggesting that people or companies looking to offset their carbon dioxide emissions should buy contraception that would be distributed in poor countries.
Optimum Population Trust (Opt) stresses that birth control will be provided only to those who have no access to it, and only unwanted births would be avoided. Opt estimates that 80 million pregnancies each year are unwanted. The cost-benefit analysis commissioned by the trust claims that family planning is the cheapest way to reduce carbon emissions [The Guardian].
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Today it’s tempting to think of Antarctica as an icy wasteland, hospitable for penguins and seals but not much else. However, before the continent was covered by a permanent ice sheet, it may have been a refuge from a world in chaos, according to findings published in a journal called Naturwissenschaften.
Jörg Fröbisch of Chicago’s Field Museum says that a distant relative of mammals, a cat-sized herbivore called Kombuisia antarctica survived the Permian-Triassic Extinction 250 million years ago by migrating from southern Africa to Antarctica. At the time of the end-Permian extinction, Antarctica was some distance north of its present location, warmer than it is today, and not covered with permanent glaciers [The Telegraph].
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SwiftHack, ClimateGate—whatever you want to call the response to hackers stealing and releasing a bevy of e-mails from the Hadley Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in the U.K., the furor simmers still. Now, as the university begins its official inquiry into the incident, climatologist Phil Jones has stepped aside as the head of the CRU pending the result.
In addition, Penn State University said it would review the papers of Michael Mann, the RealClimate blogger and Penn State researcher whose name appears in many of the East Anglia e-mails. Mann responded to the criticisms of his words here.
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We’ve covered industries and species that climate change will affect, but is more war the next side effect of a warming world? A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ties warmer temperatures to higher incidence of civil wars in Africa. The scientists warn that the continent could see 54 percent more armed conflict—and almost 400,000 more war deaths—by 2030 if climate projections prove true.
Why would war and temperature be connected? Because war and food are connected. Says research leader Marshall Burke: “Studies show that crop yields in the region are really sensitive to small shifts in temperature, even of half a degree (Celsius) or so…. If the sub-Saharan climate continues to warm and little is done to help its countries better adapt to high temperatures, the human costs are likely to be staggering” [BBC News].
For the study, Burke’s team checked local temperature and rainfall measurement between 1981 and 2002, and cross-checked that against what areas saw wars that killed at least 1,000 people. They found that combat was about 50 percent more likely in exceptionally warm years. However, not everyone agrees with Burke’s analysis. Political scientist Cullen Hendrix points out that some countries were destabilised when the superpowers withdrew aid to African dictators as the Cold War ended. “This is probably going to wind up being the first salvo in a pretty significant debate,” he says [New Scientist]. Burke’s team maintains that the temperature-war link looks robust, even when controlling for other factors like a country’s wealth or political system.
In the study, Burke and his coauthors suggest expanding irrigation in Africa and taking other steps to help area agriculture withstand temperature extremes, which under the study’s logic could also reduce warfare. But Hendrix has his doubts about this, too: “we can’t change human nature” [New Scientist], he says.
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Image: iStockphoto
This week in Nature Geoscience, a cadre of scientists going by the name Global Carbon Project will publish a meta-analysis of global carbon emissions. The study led to headlines like, “Global CO2 emissions to drop 2.8 pct in ’09: report,” and many others more in the ominous vein of “Earth ‘heading for 6C (6 degrees Celsius)’ of warming.” So how did both headlines come from the same study?
This year’s dip is correct: “In 2009, it is likely that the global financial crisis will cause global emissions to actually fall by a couple of percent,” said Michael Raupach, co-author of the report and co-chair of the Global Carbon Project [Reuters]. But, he says, the carbon cut will be short-lived if the recession ends.
In that case, the researchers say, the world will return to its normal trend. Since 2000 emissions have been rising by an average 3.4 per cent every year, compared to one per cent in the 1990s [The Telegraph]. Overall, worldwide emissions rose by 29 percent from 2000 to 2008, and the scientists put forward that 6 degrees Celsius global warming figure as a worst-case scenario—what could happen if the overall rising trend continued unabated.
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The glaciers that shine at the top of Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest peak in Africa, could vanish entirely within 15 years, according to a somber new report. Says glaciologist Lonnie Thompson: “Of the ice cover present in 1912 … 85% has disappeared and 26% of that present in 2000 is now gone” [USA Today]. The mountaintop glaciers are both shrinking around the edges and growing thinner, Thompson’s team found. If the current rate of ice loss continues, the mountain could be ice free as early as 2022.
Thompson says his team has fresh evidence that global warming is to blame. As similar changes are occurring on other mountains in Africa, South America, and in the Himalayas, Thompson says that global climate change, not local weather effects, must be responsible for the receding ice. “The fact that so many glaciers throughout the tropics and subtropics are showing similar responses suggests an underlying common cause,” Thompson said [AP].
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