NASASandy, a massive hybrid of a once-tropical storm and a mid-latitude storm, moved inland Tuesday.
Was the bizarre storm called Sandy a product, in whole or in part, of human-induced climate change?
That may not be a top-of-mind issue for the millions of people who will spend coming weeks recovering from the damage. But it is an important scientific question, one whose answers could shed light not just on why this storm happened but also on what to expect in the future.
The first thing to say is that climate scientists are just not in a good position to answer it yet.
Some of them are already offering preliminary speculations, true, but a detailed understanding of the anatomy and causes of the storm will take months, at least. In past major climate events, like the Russian heat wave and Pakistani floods of 2010, thorough analysis has taken years — and still failed to produce unanimity about the causes.
But in interviews on Tuesday, several climate scientists made some initial points. A likely contributor to the intensity of Sandy, they said, was that surface temperatures in the western Atlantic Ocean were remarkably high just ahead of the storm — in places, about five degrees Fahrenheit higher than normal for this time of year. In fact, part of the ocean was warmer than it would normally be in September, when accumulated summer heat tends to peak. Read more…
Although the difference may seem slight, Antarctic ice cover set a 33-year record on Sept. 26.
The agency that tracks polar ice reported Tuesday that winter coverage of sea ice in Antarctica has set a 33-year high. The ice hit its maximum extent on Sept. 26, at the peak of Antarctic winter, when it covered 7.5 million square miles of the Southern Ocean. That’s a half-percent increase over the previous record, set in 2006.
The National Snow and Ice Data Center uses a five-day moving average to track such matters, and always waits a few days before announcing a minimum or maximum in sea ice at either pole. That is to make sure the low or high point for the year has really been reached, given that sea ice can change abruptly in response to winds and other factors. The five-day averaging also helps smooth out small errors in the satellite tracking data.
This longstanding practice has been explained publicly many times, but that has not stopped climate-change contrarians from asserting that the snow and ice center had been trying to hide this year’s record in Antarctica by supposedly failing to make any announcement. Skeptic blogs have been humming for days about the likelihood of a record, and claiming that the growth in Antarctica offsets the disappearance of sea ice in the Arctic.
This is a claim the climate contrarians tend to make almost every time Arctic sea ice sets a record or near-record low. In reality, the trends in Antarctic sea ice are pretty small compared to what’s happening in the Arctic. Read more…
OTTAWA — The current rate of sea ice loss in the Arctic is a change without precedent for 1,450 years, a paper published on Thursday by Nature concludes.
Scientists from Canada and the United States reconstructed the Arctic sea ice cover back to the year 561 using a variety of factors including ice core samples, tree ring counts and lake sediment analysis and, where available, ice observation records.
The scientists conclude that warmer air temperatures, most likely caused by climate change, are responsible for the decline of the multiyear sea ice at a rate of 8.6 percent a decade and “may soon result in an ice-free Arctic Ocean.” Other periods of Arctic sea ice loss were, by contrast, caused by shifts in the directions of warm ocean currents. The scientists said that both the magnitude and the duration of the current ice melt is without precedent.
The authors, who include glaciologists who work for the government of Canada, added that “the loss of sea ice is having, and will continue to have, profound repercussions on the climate, ocean circulation, ecology and economics of the Arctic.”
National Snow and Ice Data CenterThe white section indicates the extent of Arctic sea ice last month, the second-lowest ever recorded, despite some expectations of a new record surpassing 2007’s. (The plus sign marks the North Pole.) The pink outline indicates the median ice extent in September from 1979 to 2000.
The massive disappearance of sea ice has become one of the bellwether indicators of a changing climate, and for much of the year, it looked like this season might set a new record low for sea ice in the Arctic.
It turns out that no record was set this year, however: when the melting bottomed out in mid-September, the ice extent for 2011 turned out to be the second-lowest of any year since satellite measurements began in 1979. The record low year is still 2007.
The National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., announced a preliminary finding to that effect here, and it released a more detailed analysis of the situation on Tuesday.
On this page, NASA offers several videos showing the melting of sea ice this year. And the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has prepared an animation of the way Arctic sea ice has changed from 1980 to the present.
Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesA boat skims through melting ice on a fjord on the western coast of Greenland.
Officials of the eight Arctic nations are taking their first concrete step to cooperate in an ecologically fragile region where climate change is driving economic competition.
Members of the Arctic Council — the United States, Russia, Canada, Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Finland and Sweden — plan to sign an agreement on Thursday to coordinate search-and-rescue operations across 13 million square miles of ocean that are becoming more navigable as Arctic sea ice decreases. In a sign of the council’s new prominence in American foreign policy, Hillary Rodham Clinton is the first secretary of state to attend one of its biannual meetings.
The agreement will be the first legally binding accord negotiated and signed by the council’s members. Officials said they hoped it would become a model for increasing international cooperation in the Arctic on far more difficult issues as the pursuit of natural resources sharpens unresolved territorial disputes and raises the prospect of pollution and environmental catastrophes.
“There are very core interests that are at stake in the Arctic,” the deputy secretary of state, James B. Steinberg, said in Washington ahead of the meeting, “but it is an opportunity to find new patterns of cooperation to deal with these challenges because clearly, these are things that the United States or any individual nation acting alone is not able to advance by acting alone.” Read more…
Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesA mother polar bear, with tracking collar, and her cub on the edge of Hudson Bay in Canada.
In a recent article, I wrote about the unusual weather patterns of the last two winters, with excessive cold and snow in the eastern United States and western Europe occurring at the same time as unusual warmth in parts of the Arctic. One thing I did not mention in that story was what the likely effect on Arctic wildlife would be if this sort of thing continues.
A new study offers an ominous forecast for one flagship Arctic species, the polar bear. Bears in some parts of the far north are under increasing stress because of climate change. These bears do most of their feeding during the winter as they venture onto the sea ice to catch seals. But with the ongoing decline of that ice in recent decades, life has gotten harder for many of the bears.
Consider, for example, the polar bears of western Hudson Bay, in Canada. Earlier breakup of the Hudson Bay ice, evidently caused by global warming, is forcing the bears ashore sooner than in the past, and the late arrival of cold weather is delaying their return to the ice in the fall. This winter has been particularly bad — parts of Hudson Bay were still open water well into January, a highly unusual situation. Read more…
Associated PressWalruses on an ice floe in the northern Bering Sea off Alaska.
The Pacific walrus is imperiled by climate change, which is melting its icy Arctic home, and merits protection under the Endangered Species Act, the federal Fish and Wildlife Service said this week. Yet protections must wait until threats to higher-priority species are addressed, the agency said.
“The threats to the walrus are very real,” Geoff Haskett, director of the Fish and Wildlife Service’s Alaska region, said on Tuesday.
But he added that the current size of the walrus population and the animal’s ability to shift to land during periods of heightened warming “make its immediate situation less dire than those facing other species such as the polar bear.”
The walrus will be designated a “candidate” species for listing under the Endangered Species Act, but under the candidate system that “places it near the end of the service’s nationwide listing priorities,” the agency said. Read more…
ReutersA lake of meltwater on the surface of the Petermann Glacier in Greenland.
As I report in Sunday’s Times, many climate scientists are frustrated by the lack of good information about the status of the world’s land ice. Yet they have nonetheless come to an informal consensus about the extent to which the sea may rise in the course of this century: roughly three feet.
Where did that figure come from?
The short answer is that it is based on calculations derived from fairly simple observations about the behavior of land ice and sea level. For that reason, no climate scientist professes huge confidence in the number. It is simply the best the researchers can do with the limited information they have today about the world’s ice.
Yet the calculations themselves are intriguing. The three-foot estimate is based on two distinct methodologies that give essentially the same answer. My interviews with climate scientists over the past several months suggested that it was the overlap between these methods that gave them enough confidence to begin offering the three-foot estimate as their best advice to governments and coastal communities.
One method was pioneered by Stefan Rahmstorf, a professor at the Institute for Climate Impact Research and at nearby Potsdam University in Germany. He told me in an interview that he went to bed one September night a few years back, thinking about the problem of sea level. In the middle of the night, his baby daughter awakened him, and he could not go back to sleep. Read more…
A senior at Cal State in Los Angeles who belongs to a student group on clean energy challenges Charles Koch, chief executive of Koch Industries, to a debate on Proposition 23, which would indefinitely suspend California’s climate change and clean energy law. Koch Industries and other out-of-state oil companies have backed the initiative with millions of dollars in donations. [It's Getting Hot In Here]
A federal judge orders the Obama administration to clarify a 2008 decision by the Bush administration that said the polar bear was threatened by global warming but not in imminent danger of extinction. The overall polar bear population appears stable, but disappearing sea ice in the Arctic is widely believed to pose a long-term threat to the species. A “special rule” accompanying the Bush administration’s ruling stated that the Endangered Species Act would not be used to set climate policy, however. [National Public Radio]
Three environmental groups file lawsuits against BP in federal court, charging that the gulf oil spill continues to harm endangered and threatened species. The suits are likely to be rolled into one case that a single federal judge will handle. “Our concern is that the impact on threatened and endangered species is going to continue for a long time after the oil spill is in the news,” a lawyer for the groups says. [The Los Angeles Times]
Extreme drought grips the South and Midwest; in Memphis, which suffered intense flooding earlier this year, just one-hundredth of an inch of rain has fallen this month. [The Wall Street Journal]
Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMarina Silva of Brazil’s Green Party after voting in the Amazon region on Sunday.
Marina Silva, the Green Party of Brazil’s presidential candidate, captures nearly 20 percent of the vote in the first round of balloting. The result was a “green tsunami,” declared the O Dia newspaper in Rio de Janeiro, where Ms. Silva garnered 32 percent of the vote. “Marina Silva’s face will not be on the ballot on Oct. 31, but her electoral ghost will decide the second round,” the newspaper says. [The Guardian]
Oil and gas companies pour vast amounts of cash into federal races, with more than $19 million in contributions to candidates and campaign committees so far this year. The top receiver of industry funds this campaign cycle is Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, with $512,284. Senator Blanche Lincoln, Democrat of Arkansas and a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee member, is close behind with $464,500. [Center for Responsive Politics]
A renewed push by House Democrats to provide subpoena power to the presidential commission investigating the BP oil spill again fails to clear the Senate before a Congressional recess. [International Business Times]
This week the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado issued a preliminary estimate of Arctic sea-ice volume for the year. The numbers will not become final until October, but the early calculation is that the summer minimum extent for Arctic sea ice hit its third-lowest level in the modern era, a bit above 2008 and somewhat above the record low of 2007.
National Snow and Ice Data CenterArctic sea ice (in white) at its minimum point for 2010, reached on Sept. 10.
Arctic sea ice grows in the winter and shrinks in the summer, of course, usually hitting a minimum around mid-September. Scientists do not have a clear picture from early in the 20th century, but they have been able to track the sea ice with satellites since 1979.
Declining Arctic sea ice is one of the bellwether indicators of climate change. The sea-ice minimum has hit dramatic lows in recent years because of warmer temperatures in the Arctic. As the ice melts, it causes temperatures to rise even further because dark water absorbs more sunlight than white ice. The change in sea ice has upended the ecology of the region and the way of life of many Arctic peoples.
The wavy line encircling the white area in this illustration shows the median extent of the sea-ice minimum from 1979 to 2000; the cross near the middle of the white expanse is the North Pole.
Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority agreed to build a Red Sea-Dead Sea water project, including a brine pipeline and desalination plant, that is meant to benefit all three parties.
How are climate change, scarcer resources, population growth and other challenges reshaping society? From science to business to politics to living, our reporters track the high-stakes pursuit of a greener globe in a dialogue with experts and readers.