Scientists have come to consensus about climate change. 

The public hasn't. Lack of public outcry has led politicians to come to a consensus on climate change:  

Do nothing.

 
Life Fast is a synchronized 40-day fast and hunger strike protest and community music and film festival staged to create the needed public outcry.

Scientists link global warming to England’s rainiest year on record

Senior climate scientists are linking global warming to the UK Met Office's announcement yesterday (3 January) that 2012 was England’s rainiest year since records began. 

The weather service's numbers showed that due to slightly more seasonal figures in Wales and Scotland, the UK as a whole experienced its second wettest summer recorded.

But four of the UK’s Top Five wettest years have now occurred since 2000, a statistic in line with the expectations of climatologists who model the effects of a warming world.

“It is not just Britain but many other parts of northern Europe and north America that are getting wetter and there is a climate change component to it,” Kevin Trenberth told EurActiv over a phone line from the US National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

Trenberth has won several awards for his scientific research, including the Nobel Peace Prize which he was co-awarded in 2007 for his work as lead author on the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s fourth risk assessment report.

“The overall pattern has been that middle to high latitudes [have] an increase in precipitation that goes with a warming climate, and the fact that the air can hold more moisture so the hydrological cycle speeds up,” he said.

Increased moisture in the air can also fuel super storms like Hurricane Sandy, in the view of Trenberth and many other scientists, even if such effects can be difficult to predict.

“A global intensification of intense rainfall events is a very robust expectation with climate change,” said Gabriele Hegerl, an expert in the influence of climate change on precipitation at Edinburgh University.
Hegerl, who is also an IPCC author, told EurActiv that the phenomenon had already been observed on a global basis.

Although there was some uncertainty about the increased variability in downpours and floods, recorded increases in heavy precipitation “can be attributed to greenhouse gases and anthropomorphic climate change,” she said.

8,000 homes and businesses flooded

According to the Met Office’s figures, at least 8,000 British homes and businesses were flooded in 2012, a year which saw 1337.3 mm of rain overall, just 6.6 mm shy of the record set in 2000. The Met Office said that its preliminary research suggested that the character of this rainfall was changing too, with severe downpours becoming more frequent over time.

“The trend towards more extreme rainfall events is one we are seeing around the world, in countries such as India and China, and now potentially here in the UK,” said Professor Julia Slingo, the chief scientist at the Met Office.

“Much more research is needed to understand more about the causes and potential implications,” she added. In the 30-year periods between 1961-1990 and 1981-2010, annual UK rainfall increased by around 5%.
Climate modeling suggests that this trend will increase across the planet, although rainfall levels will vary widely.

Sudden and severe downpours

Greenhouse gases can stabilise the atmosphere as well as warming and moistening it, leading to more sudden and severe downpours from clouds heavy with water.

“If you draw a line around the globe starting with the UK, this whole region is expected to become wetter,” Hegerl said, “the wet regions become wetter and the dry regions drier.”

“We’re foreseeing a range of changes that will make the Mediterranean particularly vulnerable to becoming more dry,” she added.

As well as Europe’s dry region moving north, when the North Atlantic Oscillation – which brings rain to Scandinavia and northern Europe – is high, winter storm systems tend to move into northern Europe and not the Mediterranean.

Yet despite the increasing evidence of changing and often extreme weather patterns, scientists say they are increasingly concerned at a lack of urgency among policy makers in tackling the problem.

“It seems like the policy has been to grin and bear it and suffer the consequences,” Trenberth said. “Certainly there is no planning to mitigate these events and reduce the odds of their happening again in the future.”
“It is very disappointing and extremely short-sighted,” he said. 

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Climate models that predict more droughts win further scientific support

 

 

The United States will suffer a series of severe droughts in the next two decades, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change. Moreover, global warming will play an increasingly important role in their abundance and severity, claims Aiguo Dai, the study’s author.

His findings bolster conclusions from climate models used by researchers around the globe that have predicted severe and widespread droughts in coming decades over many land areas. Those models had been questioned because they did not fully reflect actual drought patterns when they were applied to conditions in the past. However, using a statistical method with data about sea surface temperatures, Dai, a climate researcher at the federally funded National Center for Atmospheric Research, found that the model accurately portrayed historic climate events.

“We can now be more confident that the models are correct,” Dai said, “but unfortunately, their predictions are dire.”

In the United States, the main culprit currently is a cold cycle in the surface temperature of the eastern Pacific Ocean. It decreases precipitation, especially over the western part of the country. “We had a similar situation in the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s,” said Dai, who works at the research center’s headquarters in Boulder, Colo.

While current models cannot predict the severity of a drought in a given year, they can assess its probability. “Considering the current trend, I was not surprised by the 2012 drought,” Dai said.

The Pacific cycle is expected to last for the next one or two decades, bringing more aridity. On top of that comes climate change. “Global warming has a subtle effect on drought at the moment,” Dai said, “but by the end of the cold cycle, global warming might take over and continue to cause dryness.”

While the variations in sea temperatures primarily influence precipitation, global warming is expected to bring droughts by increasing evaporation over land. Additionally, Dai predicts more dryness in South America, Southern Europe and Africa.

“The similarity between the observed droughts and the projections from climate models here is striking,” said Peter Cox, a professor of climate system dynamics at Britain’s University of Exeter, who was not involved in Dai’s research. He said he also agrees that the latest models suggest increasing drought to be consistent with man-made climate change.

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Environmental Defense Fund

 How we know human activity is causing warming

We know the planet is warming — scientists have a clear understanding why

The theory of global warming is nothing new. The Nobel Prize-winning chemist Svante Arrhenius first proposed the idea of global warming in 1896. Carbon dioxide, he knew, traps heat in the Earth's atmosphere. He also knew that burning coal and oil releases carbon dioxide (CO₂).
Arrhenius speculated that continued burning of coal and oil would increase concentrations of CO₂ in the Earth's atmosphere, making the planet warmer. It's called the greenhouse effect.

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Sen. Boxer firms up plans for weekly ‘climate change clearinghouse'

 

Senate Democrats — and any interested Republicans — will huddle weekly on climate change in the next Congress in an “open forum” to help craft and support legislation, the plan’s architect said.
Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) told The Hill on Tuesday that the “climate change clearinghouse” will also focus on working with the Obama administration and keeping members of abreast of the latest science.

Boxer said she will co-chair the clearinghouse alongside the chairmen of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Boxer first announced the idea earlier in December, and it crystallized further at a meeting Tuesday, she said.

“We are going to review the latest information, we are going to work on supporting a major bill, we are also going to work on various smaller provisions that we think will move us forward and focus on green jobs, energy efficiency and making sure that we get the carbon out of the air, and work with the administration on some executive stuff,” she said in the Capitol.
“So I think it is going to be a very major and important clearinghouse because as the science comes in, we are going to take a look at that science so that we are all up to date,” Boxer added.

She said it would be an “open forum” that will provide lawmakers a chance to raise topics of interest to them — such as reports from their states and actions in state legislatures — and ask questions too.

“It is a place where people can come to give information, to get information, to ask questions of staff. We will have a good staff presence there,” Boxer said.

Asked about the plan to develop a “major bill,” Boxer said it would address both curbing carbon emissions and ways to “harden our infrastructure to protect our people against extreme weather,” and include energy efficiency provisions and other measures.

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Ice sheet loss at both poles increasing, study finds

November 29, 2012

By Alan Buis,
Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Steve Cole,
NASA Headquarters

Esther Harward,
University of Leeds, United Kingdom

PASADENA, Calif. - An international team of experts supported by NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) has combined data from multiple satellites and aircraft to produce the most comprehensive and accurate assessment to date of ice sheet losses in Greenland and Antarctica and their contributions to sea level rise.

In a landmark study published Thursday in the journal Science, 47 researchers from 26 laboratories report the combined rate of melting for the ice sheets covering Greenland and Antarctica has increased during the last 20 years. Together, these ice sheets are losing more than three times as much ice each year (equivalent to sea level rise of 0.04 inches or 0.95 millimeters) as they were in the 1990s (equivalent to 0.01 inches or 0.27 millimeters). About two-thirds of the loss is coming from Greenland, with the rest from Antarctica.

This rate of ice sheet losses falls within the range reported in 2007 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The spread of estimates in the 2007 IPCC report was so broad, however, it was not clear whether Antarctica was growing or shrinking. The new estimates, which are more than twice as accurate because of the inclusion of more satellite data, confirm both Antarctica and Greenland are losing ice. Combined, melting of these ice sheets contributed 0.44 inches (11.1 millimeters) to global sea levels since 1992. This accounts for one-fifth of all sea level rise over the 20-year survey period. The remainder is caused by the thermal expansion of the warming ocean, melting of mountain glaciers and small Arctic ice caps, and groundwater mining.

The study was produced by an international collaboration -- the Ice Sheet Mass Balance Inter-comparison Exercise (IMBIE) -- that combined observations from 10 satellite missions to develop the first consistent measurement of polar ice sheet changes. The researchers reconciled differences among dozens of earlier ice sheet studies by carefully matching observation periods and survey areas. They also combined measurements collected by different types of satellite sensors, such as ESA's radar missions; NASA's Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat); and the NASA/German Aerospace Center's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE).

"What is unique about this effort is that it brought together the key scientists and all of the different methods to estimate ice loss," said Tom Wagner, NASA's cryosphere program manager in Washington. "It's a major challenge they undertook, involving cutting-edge, difficult research to produce the most rigorous and detailed estimates of ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica to date. The results of this study will be invaluable in informing the IPCC as it completes the writing of its Fifth Assessment Report over the next year."
Professor Andrew Shepherd of the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom coordinated the study, along with research scientist Erik Ivins of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Shepherd said the venture's success is because of the cooperation of the international scientific community and the precision of various satellite sensors from multiple space agencies.

"Without these efforts, we would not be in a position to tell people with confidence how Earth's ice sheets have changed, and to end the uncertainty that has existed for many years," Shepherd said.
The study found variations in the pace of ice sheet change in Antarctica and Greenland.
"Both ice sheets appear to be losing more ice now than 20 years ago, but the pace of ice loss from Greenland is extraordinary, with nearly a five-fold increase since the mid-1990s," Ivins said. "In contrast, the overall loss of ice in Antarctica has remained fairly constant, with the data suggesting a 50-percent increase in Antarctic ice loss during the last decade."

For more on ICESat, visit: http://icesat.gsfc.nasa.gov. For more on GRACE, visit: http://www.csr.utexas.edu/grace.

Click here to read the NASA website

 The U.S. Global Change Research Program

  The U.S. Global Change Research Program combines the research of all Federal agencies regarding climate science. They have a fabulous website.

 Click here for U.S. Global Change Research Program website

"The U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) coordinates and integrates federal research on changes in the global environment and their implications for society. The USGCRP began as a presidential initiative in 1989 and was mandated by Congress in the Global Change Research Act of 1990 (P.L. 101-606), which called for "a comprehensive and integrated United States research program which will assist the Nation and the world to understand, assess, predict, and respond to human-induced and natural processes of global change."

"Thirteen departments and agencies participate in the USGCRP, which was known as the U.S. Climate Change Science Program from 2002 through 2008. The program is steered by the Subcommittee on Global Change Research under the Committee on Environment and Natural Resources, overseen by the Executive Office of the President, and facilitated by the National Coordination Office."

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