The article I read this week laid out the commitments put forth by many of the world’s leaders in the Paris Climate Accord that was signed in New York last week. The major parties include the US, the EU, China, India, Brazil, and Indonesia. All of these global powers promise a reduction in carbon emissions ranging from 20-40% below some value no earlier than 1990. China, America, and the EU plan to accomplish this primarily by shifting away from coal to renewable energy sources, like India who plans to increase its solar energy generation by more than a factor of 30, while countries such as Brazil and Indonesia plan to stem the mass deforestation that occurs in those countries. Russia, unsurprisingly, has made no formal commitment to combat climate change. India was also one of the only countries to commit to a significant reforestation program. One thing I found both interesting and embarrassing was that no public official in China vocally denies climate change, while here in the US, two of the leading presidential candidates as well as numerous members of congress and the Supreme Court openly reject the science of climate change. Additionally, it is embarrassing that Obama’s major initiative to begin mitigating global warming has been stalled by complaints filed in the Supreme Court that cannot be ruled upon until a new Justice is appointed. Brazil and the EU also face potential political challenges that may cause them to fall short of their commitments.

Though many scientists criticize the pledges made as not being aggressive enough in combating global warming, it is a critical step in the right direction that I trust will be built upon and upgraded in the coming decades. The cooperation shown by the world’s leaders is truly inspiring as someone who is very concerned about our climate, and I look forward to what we will be able to accomplish in the future.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/04/21/science/paris-agreement-carbon-dioxide-global-warming.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fearth&action=click&contentCollection=earth&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=0

Earlier in the semester I posted about the severity of California’s water crisis and the measures the state’s governor had made to mitigate it. Last year the snow pack in the Sierra, which comprises nearly a 3rd of CA’s water source, was a mere 5% of the average. This year, thanks to the strong El Nino in the eastern Pacific, the snowpack was up to 87% of the average. [1] This seems at first glance to be a great improvement, and as though it could significantly aid Californian’s in their need for water. However, this is not necessarily the case for several reasons, which are enumerated in the article from the New York Times cited below. First and foremost, the majority of this snowpack is unlikely to be of help to the southern half of the state, which is typically drier to begin with. Second, as global warming progresses we are seeing higher proportions of the winter precipitation falling in liquid form as opposed to snow, causing more to run off quickly rather than be released slowly during spring time melting. Lastly, and coincident with my project topic for another class, the decrease in natural wildfires has lead to an average of 500% increase in trees per acre, which diminishes the water supply both through uptake for growing and proximate melting from the heat they give off. The primary message I took from this article was that despite having significantly more snowpack this year compared to last, Californians cannot afford to relax their water saving strategies in the face of global warming.

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/12/science/california-snow-drought-sierra-nevada-water.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fearth&action=click&contentCollection=earth&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=0

Sea level rise is a prolific topic in climate change that I have written about a few times this semester. This week brings a new victim to be threatened by the rising tides: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Besides leading the world in space exploration, NASA also contributes a great deal of research on climate change and its impacts, making it ironic that they should be among those expected to be most immediately effected. Furthermore, I would have expected NASA to be among the most prepared groups, as they work on some of the nation’s most sophisticated technology. However, about two thirds of NASA’s facilities lie within 16 feet of sea level and along coastlines [1], making them exceptionally vulnerable to storm surges coupled with rising sea level. Couple the billions of dollars of investment and low elevation with an expected increase in the magnitude of hurricanes going forward, and you have a recipe for disaster. The Kennedy Space Center in Florida will likely be the first to experience these effects, as their beaches are already showing signs of major erosion, but the centers in Houston and San Francisco will likely also begin to see these changes by the end of the century. While retreat from the shorelines may be a slow, expensive, and difficult process, it will likely become necessary in the future. For this reason, and as with all issues related to climate change, it is best to begin investing in that solution now before the problem becomes too large and exceeds our ability to cope.

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/05/science/nasa-is-facing-a-climate-change-countdown.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fearth&action=click&contentCollection=earth&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=0

Sea level rise is perhaps the most tangible and ubiquitous consequence of global warming, with major cities all over the world being threatened by its encroachment. A new model, co-designed by Penn State’s Dr. David Pollard and informed by Dr. Richard Alley, suggests that the IPCC’s most recent end-of-century sea level-rise projections may underestimate what is possible under the loss of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet by several feet. [1] Dr. Alley suggested the mechanism for faster disintegration which entails the loss of the buffering sea ice that borders the ice sheet due to warming waters around the continent. This could then destabilize the ice sheet to such a degree that it’s loss could become rapid, and the ice sheet holds enough water to raise sea level by 12 feet. When this method was incorporated into the model, Dr. Pollard and his colleagues were for the first time replicate a rise in sea level of 20-30 feet which is known to have occurred in a warming event 125,000 years ago. The test of a good climate model is its ability to recreate climate history, so this success lead further credibility to the model as it was used to predict the effects of human-induced warming on the ice sheets and sea level rise. Under the new model conditions, researches found it would be possible to achieve 5-6 feet of total sea level rise by the end of the century, which could be catastrophic to major low-lying cities and countries. This result is in no way definitive, but it does have the effect of making our future outlook even more bleak if we do not take serious steps to abate our carbon emissions and global warming at large.

Source:

On Tuesday this week, the same day as the Brussels terrorist attacks, retired NASA scientist James Hansen and his team of researches released a co-authored paper that suggested even the restricted warming agreed upon in the Paris Climate Talks will be too great to avoid some serious impacts of global warming. The foundation for the argument stems from the last time the Earth warmed comparably to the observed modern trend. During this time there is evidence that large portions of land-ice were lost and sea level rose as much as 20-30 feet. [1] The author’s also suggest these effects, as well as far more powerful storms, could begin to be felt within the next 50 years, an idea that is contended by many leading climate scientists including Penn State’s own Dr. Michael Mann.

I also have several reservations as to the proposed mechanisms for these impacts, one of which suggests that the influx of freshwater from melting glaciers can shut down the Atlantic Conveyor Belt (which has happened in recent history) and that this will exacerbate the melting of the ice sheets and lead to an amplification of global warming. However, when this happened previously it plunged Europe into the “Little Ice Age,” as warm water was prevented from reaching the North Atlantic and delivering heat to the continent. Another mechanism described in the paper, the idea that an increase in the equator-to-pole temperature gradient will cause more severe weather is contrary to all my research on the topic. Firstly, scientists have found that this temperature gradient is decreasing with global warming as the Arctic regions warm more rapidly than the rest of the planet. Furthermore, it is this decrease in temperature gradient that allows the Polar Jet Stream to wander more North to South, and set up in troughs or ridges that favor higher or lower than average precipitation in a given area, respectively. So it is actually the decrease in this gradient that is likely to cause more severe weather.

Those points of contention aside, Dr. Hansen has been one of the world’s leading scientists and activists against global warming and the fossil fuel industry, so his commitment to abating the problem cannot be denied. His colleagues simply worry whether his political leanings have begun to influence his science. Whether this is the case or not, I think Dr. Mann is correct in saying, “‘We ignore James Hansen at our own peril.'”

Source:

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/23/science/global-warming-sea-level-carbon-dioxide-emissions.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fearth&action=click&contentCollection=earth&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=0

Yesterday, the South Pacific island nation of Fiji was battered by the most intense tropical storm ever recorded, according to a VICE News article (1). Citizens of the low lying country battled Category 5 winds reaching 177 mph, and the damage has yet to be calculated. Doing so will require not just an accounting of the financial damage caused to buildings and infrastructure, loss of property, and costs of repair. The assessment will also need to account for things such as businesses being shutdown and increased need of medical assistance, let alone the incalculable emotional toll this storm may have for the people of Fiji.

This incredible storm fits perfectly into the projections made by climatologists that are consequences of global warming. There is a positive feedback between the water vapor content of the atmosphere and the temperature of the Earth, and and increase in both lead to more powerful storms. Fiji was the first country to unanimously ratify the UN climate change agreement, making it that much more unfortunate that they should be taking the brunt of the effects from climate change. Sadly the same gross irony plays out in this way all over the world as a result of climate change, and only a global effort will be able to mitigate its impacts.

Source:

https://news.vice.com/article/fiji-just-got-hammered-by-one-of-the-most-powerful-tropical-storms-ever-recorded

On Tuesday, February 9th, the conservative-led Supreme Court ruled that enforcement of the policies laid out in President Obama’s Clean Power Plan should be halted until the “legality” of this legislature could be determined. [1] The Plan, which was established in accord with the agreements made at the Paris Climate Talks, aims to cut the carbon dioxide emissions of existing power plants by one third by the year 2030. While states are not required to meet the regulations laid out until 2022, they were expected to present their plans for doing so to the EPA by this September. However, this forestalling of the Plan will set this process back indefinitely, and the U.S. will continue to make no efforts to nationally lower our greenhouse gas emissions. The arguments made against the Plan are based on the economic strain that the initiative will put on states whose economies depend largely on fossil fuel-generated power, and on the utility companies there in. To me, however, these arguments are still less substantial than the impact we are having on climate. There should be no misconceptions on the difficulty reducing carbon emissions will pose – it is not going to be an easy process, and everyone knows this, but the longer we delay the inevitably necessary, the more potential warming we generate, and the greater the impacts that will result from climate change.

Since this decision was made, one of the most outspokenly conservative Justices on the Supreme Court who supported the effort to stall any progress on climate change, Antonin Scalia, has died. His position must be filled by a presidential nomination that is approved by the Senate, and President Obama seems very much inclined to making the appointment, contrary to the Republican Senator’s wishes that he wait for the next President to make the appointment. [2] This leaves the fate of the Clean Power Plan in a very tenuous state, although the Court’s decision to stall it will continue to be upheld. The President may attempt to appoint a moderate Justice that has a better chance of being approved than a liberal, but it is very unclear what effect this would have on the Plan. The President could also go for broke and appoint a liberal Justice who will likely support the Plan, but it would not be unheard of or surprising for the Republican-dominated Senate to stall this process as well, leaving the Supreme Court with an even 8 Justices until the next President comes in to office. Only time will tell if things will get better or worse for the Clean Power Plan, but those of us who study the climate system are desperately hoping for the better, and fast.

Sources:

1. http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2016/02/09/us/politics/ap-us-supreme-court-clean-air-lawsuits.html
2. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/14/us/politics/battle-begins-over-naming-next-justice.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=span-abc-region&region=span-abc-region&WT.nav=span-abc-region&_r=0

German scientists succeeded in creating hydrogen plasma in their fusion reactor known as a stellarator this past Wednesday. The device is truly staggering in its cost, and its power. Taking 19 years and around 1.2 billion euro, the stellarator consists of 425 tons of superconducting magnet coils that form a vacuum tube to suspend the plasma, which is created by heating hydrogen gas to 80 million degrees Celsius. [1] For a point of reference, the center of the sun is only around 10 million °C. [2] The reactor is made to run the experiment for up to a half hour, but as this was the first trial with hydrogen the operators wanted to avoid any unnecessary risk by running it for longer than a second or two. [3] This is truly a milestone for fusion technology because creating and maintaining hydrogen plasma is the first step in fusing two nuclei because they have thus been stripped of their electrons and may collide to form a helium nucleus, yielding large amounts of energy. [4] However, there remains a long road of scientific progress ahead before we can sustainably run fusion reactions and harness the resulting energy, and there is the problem of the low abundance of elemental hydrogen on earth. That being said, if we can master these challenges we will be able to meet all of our energy needs in a sustainable way by harnessing the same power as the sun.

Sources:

1. http://motherboard.vice.com/read/nuclear-fusion-hit-a-massive-milestone-in-germany?trk_source=homepage-lede%3Futm_source%3Dvicenewsfb
2. http://coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu/ask/7-How-hot-is-the-Sun-
3. http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2016/02/03/world/europe/ap-eu-nuclear-fusion.html?_r=0
4. http://www.planete-energies.com/en/medias/close/about-nuclear-fusion

Climate change is always spoken about in terms of the future; most will not feel its effects for decades to come. For that reason the majority of the world lacks a sense of urgency in its efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change. We are currently losing landlocked ice due to the warming of the Polar Regions and the subsequent sea level rise is already being observed in low-lying countries such as Bangladesh. The article Borrowed Time on Disappearing Land by Gardiner Harris of the New York Times [1] outlines the struggle of Jahanara Khatun, an impoverished farmer who lives in the Ganges Delta of Bangladesh. The land here sits only a few feet above sea level if at all, and the people living there are already witnessing the encroaching tides. To make matters worse large parts of the country are actually subsiding even lower as they pump the aquifers to supply their drinking water. The citizens such as Ms. Khatun struggle to survive on a daily basis in a place where the soil is being sewn with salt by the rising sea, living in mud and bamboo huts in a place known to experience cylcones that are predicted to become more intense as global warming continues. They are exceptionally vulnerable to the effects of climate change and yet Bangladesh as a nation is responsible for only .3% of the worlds increase in greenhouse gases.¹ This is a typical case of environmental injustice that recurs around the world as a result of anthropogenic climate change: those who have contributed the least will suffer its impacts most. We often forget that many people on the world struggle to survive every day, but let this serve as a reminder that those are the people most in need of rapid action on climate change, and we as a nation have a great moral responsibility to catalyze that action.

As many of you may have heard by now, 2015 was the hottest year in recorded history (1), dispelling the notion that the climate has not been warming since 1998. When one views the global pattern of warming on a map, a striking feature is that the most warming has occurred in the Arctic region. This troubling fact is the result of a positive feedback mechanism known as Arctic Amplification, which goes a little something like this: as the climate warms, we lose more of the snow and ice cover in the Arctic. This subsequently exposes more dark ocean, decreasing global albedo and allowing the Arctic to absorb ever more heat. This effect serves to decrease the temperature gradient between the Tropics and the Arctic that is responsible for the Polar Jet Stream, a ribbon of high-altitude, fast flowing air that marks the boundary between the Polar and Tropical air masses. This boundary, also known as the Polar front, is the place where weather is primarily controlled. Decreasing the temperature gradient allows the jet stream to flow more slowly, and the air masses to protrude farther North or South than would otherwise be possible. As Jennifer Francis and Stephen Vavrus have shown in their study, a less restrictive jet stream tends to “set-up” in particular patterns that favor droughts in some areas and excessive precipitation in others. (2) Among the many obvious challenges that are coming along with global warming, a less obvious but still alarming one is the persistence of these strange weather patterns which will continue to create extreme conditions such as the recurring drought in California. For this and all the other reasons, climate change must be abated as quickly as possible to mitigate the consequences that are coming our way.

References:

(1) http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/21/science/earth/2015-hottest-year-global-warming.html?ref=earth&_r=0

(2) http://marine.rutgers.edu/~francis/pres/Francis_Vavrus_2012GL051000_pub.pdf

Hello everyone. My name is Jordan and I am a senior in Earth Science and Policy, Climate Change option, and I am very excited to take this course. I hope to learn about the more acute impacts that climate change will have on humans and our planet, and the actions that can be taken in the present to mitigate them. Outside of class I love riding my bike, skiing and skateboarding, reading, and listening to music. I have taken several online classes of varying difficulty before, and I imagine a hybrid class such as this will prove to be more enjoyable than they were.