Evidence from warm past confirms recent IPCC estimates of climate sensitivity

A press release from the University of Southampton: New evidence showing the level of atmospheric CO2 millions of years ago supports recent climate change predications from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

A multinational research team, led by scientists at the University of Southampton, has analysed new records showing the CO2 content of the Earth’s atmosphere between 2.3 to 3.3 million years ago, over the Pliocene.

During the Pliocene, the Earth was around 2ºC warmer than it is today and atmospheric CO2 levels were around 350-400 parts per million (ppm), similar to the levels reached in recent years. By studying the relationship between CO2 levels and climate change during a warmer period in Earth’s history, the scientists have been able to estimate how the climate will respond to increasing levels of carbon dioxide, a parameter known as ‘climate sensitivity’.

The findings, which have been published in Nature, also show how climate sensitivity can vary over the long term. “Today the Earth is still adjusting to the recent rapid rise of CO2 caused by human activities, whereas the longer-term Pliocene records document the full response of CO2-related warming,” says Southampton’s Dr Gavin Foster, co-author of the study.

“Our estimates of climate sensitivity lie well within the range of 1.5 to 4.5ºC increase per CO2 doubling summarised in the latest IPCC report. This suggests that the research community has a sound understanding of what the climate will be like as we move toward a Pliocene-like warmer future caused by human greenhouse gas emissions.”...

Fossils from the Pliocene, shot by H. Zell, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Funding drought threatens Zimbabwe climate change response

Madalitso Mwando in the Thomson Reuters Foundation: Zimbabwe is struggling to pay for measures to cope with climate stresses and weather-related disasters, such as recent floods, amid domestic spending cuts and slow progress in accessing international finance.

The budget for the Ministry of Environment, Water and Climate has been reduced to $52 million for 2015, from $93 million set aside for 2014. As this year began with floods that have claimed some 20 lives and washed away villages, the funding squeeze has raised concerns about the country's preparedness for climate-linked disasters, which are expected to worsen as the planet warms.

The Civil Protection Unit, the state's disaster response agency, was caught unawares by the floods, exposing a lack of effective early warning for extreme weather events. The meteorological services department received $400,000 from the government last year - less than a tenth of the $5 million it says it needs annually.

Barnabas Chipindu, a meteorologist and lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe, said economic hardship had shrunk state capacity to deal with climate-related disasters. "The country does not have enough resources to combat the adverse impacts of climate variability," Chipindu told the Thomson Reuters Foundation....

Researchers link smoke from fires to tornado intensity

Gary Galluzo at Iowa Now: Can smoke from fires intensify tornadoes? “Yes,” say University of Iowa researchers, who examined the effects of smoke—resulting from spring agricultural land-clearing fires in Central America—transported across the Gulf of Mexico and encountering tornado conditions already in process in the United States.

The UI study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, examined the smoke impacts on a historic severe weather outbreak that occurred during the afternoon and evening of April 27, 2011. The weather event produced 122 tornadoes, resulted in 313 deaths across the southeastern United States, and is considered the most severe event of its kind since 1950.

The outbreak was caused mainly by environmental conditions leading to a large potential for tornado formation and conducive to supercells, a type of thunderstorm. However, smoke particles intensified these conditions, according to co-lead authors Gregory Carmichael, professor of chemical and biochemical engineering, and Pablo Saide, Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research (CGRER) postdoctoral fellow.

They say the smoke lowered the base of the clouds and increased wind shear, defined as wind speed variations with respect to altitude. Together, those two conditions increased the likelihood of more severe tornadoes. The effects of smoke on these conditions had not been previously described, and the study found a novel mechanism to explain these interactions.

“These results are of great importance, as it is the first study to show smoke influence on tornado severity in a real case scenario. Also, severe weather prediction centers do not include atmospheric particles and their effects in their models, and we show that they should at least consider it,” says Carmichael....

The satellite image for April 27, 2011 shows the southeastern United States, Central America and the Gulf of Mexico—along with tornado tracks (red solid lines, with the thickest indicating a magnitude 5 tornado, descending to magnitude 1 for the thinnest—for the period April 26-28, 2011. Yellow markers indicate fires, and an iridescent overlay shows particulate matter in the air, with red showing highest amount and purple the lowest. Imagery courtesy of Brad Pierce, NOAA Satellite and Information Service Center for Satellite Applications and Research.

Sao Paulo warns of severe water rationing

Space Daily via AFP: Authorities in Sao Paulo, Brazil's richest state and economic hub, have warned they are considering severe water rationing if the country's worst drought in 80 years continues. Officials outlined draconian plans for alternating cuts that would leave areas without water for five days at a time.

"If the rain persists in not falling into the Cantareira reservoir system, the solution would be for very heavy rationing," said Paulo Massato, director of the state water company Sabesp. Sabesp runs the Cantareira system, which supplies nearly half of the Sao Paulo metropolitan area, South America's largest city with some 20 million people.

"The rationing would see two days with water and then five without," he said late Tuesday.
Massato said it was the only way to avoid a total cut in water supplies, which have been depleted by months of severe drought that have sent water levels to their lowest levels in living memory. Unless it rains soon, supplies could run out altogether by March....

Sao Paulo skyline shot by Jurema Oliveira, Wikimedia Commons. he copyright holder of this file allows anyone to use it for any purpose, provided that the source (http://www.fotosedm.hpg.ig.com.br/) is cited

World has not woken up to water crisis caused by climate change

Nita Bhalla in Reuters via the Thomson Reuters Foundation: Water scarcity could lead to conflict between communities and nations as the world is still not fully aware of the water crisis many countries face as a result of climate change, the head of the U.N. panel of climate scientists warned on Tuesday.

The latest report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts a rise in global temperature of between 0.3 and 4.8 degrees Celsius (0.5 to 8.6 Fahrenheit) by the late 21st century.

Countries such as India are likely to be hit hard by global warming, which will bring more freak weather such as droughts that will lead to serious water shortages and affect agricultural output and food security.

"Unfortunately, the world has not really woken up to the reality of what we are going to face in terms of the crises as far as water is concerned," IPCC Chair Rajendra Pachauri told participants at a conference on water security.

"If you look at agricultural products, if you look at animal protein - the demand for which is growing - that's highly water intensive. At the same time, on the supply side, there are going to be several constraints. Firstly because there are going to be profound changes in the water cycle due to climate change."...

Umia Lake in Iran, all dried up in 2012, in a spot where the water was four meters deep not so many years ago. Shot by Yoosef Pooranvary, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported 3.0 license 

South Africa inventions aim to stop slum fires

Terra Daily via AFP: South Africans social entrepreneurs have come up with inventions aimed at curbing deadly fires and floods in the country's crowded informal settlements. A turquoise detector no bigger than a pack of cigarettes is among the innovations being showcased at a technology exhibition in the capital Pretoria.

While a conventional fire detector is set off by smoke, Lumkani, meaning "be aware" in the Xhosa language, looks for another signal: heat. "Shack environments tend to be fairly smokey because of a lack of electrification," Lumkani's co-designer, University of Cape Town engineering lecturer Samuel Ginsberg, said.

"Shack dwellers often use fire inside their shacks for cooking. So a normal smoke detector, which is what you would use in your home, is not effective -- it would false trigger far too often." Lumkani's alarm is set off instead by a quick and unusual rise in temperature.

Fires spread quickly in the dense slums that ring many towns and cities in South Africa. Packed close together, the shacks of wood planks and plastic sheeting are often razed to the ground within minutes. A series of mid-summer fires in 2013, fuelled by gusty winds, tore through the Cape Town townships of Khayelitsha and Thembeni, leaving around 4,000 homeless in just two days...

Soweto, outside Johannesburg, shot by Medpro, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Invasive species in the Great Lakes by 2063

A press release from McGill University: The Great Lakes have been invaded by more non-native species than any other freshwater ecosystem in the world. In spite of increasing efforts to stem the tide of invasion threats, the lakes remain vulnerable, according to scientists from McGill University and colleagues in Canada and the United States.

If no new regulations are enforced, they predict new waves of invasions and identify some species that could invade the Lakes over the next 50 years.

Over the past two centuries, more than 180 non-native species have been recorded in the Great Lakes and the rivers that flow into them. Nearly 20% of these species are considered to be harmful ecologically and economically, posing threats to the Lakes’ native biodiversity and multibillion dollar fishery. New threats are emerging because of risks associated with trade in live organisms and climate change, the researchers caution in a study in the Journal of Great Lakes Research.

In recent years, the pace of species invasions appears to have slowed dramatically, as measures have been taken to protect the lakes. This is why the three scenarios (optimistic, pessimistic and status quo) the researchers considered for the next 50 years hinge on the implementation and effectiveness of regulations aimed at blocking current means of entry for invasive species.

...In the most optimistic scenario, the risk of invasion is minimized by harmonized policies enforced by Canada and the United States. “Invasions are a transboundary issue,” says McGill professor Anthony Ricciardi, an invasive-species biologist who supervised the study. “In addition to harmonized regulations on live trade, the two countries must coordinate early detection and rapid response to new threats – before an invasion has progressed beyond control.”...

A photo from the EPA of a ship docked in Duluth, Minnesota

UN agency continues distribution of emergency health kits to Nepal's flood survivors

UN News Centre: Five months after a series of landslides and subsequent flooding brought devastation to large swathes of Nepal, thousands of survivors continue to remain exposed to bitter temperatures and wintry conditions, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has warned.

The UN agency – which has a mandate to focus on improving sexual and reproductive health issues for women around the world – has been active on the ground since mid-August when the Government of Nepal launched an appeal for humanitarian assistance following the massive flooding and landslides which affected some 130,000 people across 23 of the country’s districts.

The agency has since been distributing so-called ‘dignity kits’ containing warm winter clothes, flashlights, soap, and sanitary napkins, as well as reproductive health kits to uprooted families. The reproductive health kits, for their part, are made up of medicines, equipment to support safe deliveries, family planning supplies and supplies to aid in the treatment of rape.

Overall, each kit is designed to provide reproductive health services to between 10,000 and 30,000 women for a three-month period....

A September 2014 flood in Nepal, shot by Beemall.99, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license 

Iceland rises as its glaciers melt from climate change

Mari N. Jensen at the University of Arizona College of Science: The Earth’s crust under Iceland is rebounding as global warming melts the island’s great ice caps, a University of Arizona-led team reports in an upcoming issue of Geophysical Research Letters.

The paper is the first to show the current fast uplift of the Icelandic crust is a result of accelerated melting of the island’s glaciers and coincides with the onset of warming that began about 30 years ago, the scientists said.

Some sites in south-central Iceland are moving upward as much as 1.4 inches per year — a speed that surprised the researchers. "Our research makes the connection between recent accelerated uplift and the accelerated melting of the Icelandic ice caps," said first author Kathleen Compton, a UA geosciences doctoral candidate.

Geologists have long known that as glaciers melt and become lighter, the Earth rebounds as the weight of the ice decreases. Whether the current rebound geologists detect is related to past deglaciation or modern ice loss has been an open question until now, said co-author Richard Bennett, a UA associate professor of geosciences. "Iceland is the first place we can say accelerated uplift means accelerated ice mass loss," Bennett said.

To figure out how fast the crust was moving upward, the team used a network of 62 global positioning satellite receivers fastened to rocks throughout Iceland. By tracking the position of the GPS receivers year after year, the scientists "watch" the rocks move and can calculate how far they have traveled — a technique called geodesy.

The new work shows that, at least for Iceland, the land’s current accelerating uplift is directly related to the thinning of glaciers and to global warming. "What we’re observing is a climatically induced change in the Earth’s surface," Bennett said....

The geyser called Strokkur erupts in Iceland, shot by Andreas Tille, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Fourteen of 15 Hottest Years Have Been in 21st Century

A press release from the World Meteorological Organization: The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has ranked 2014 as the hottest year on record, as part of a continuing trend. After consolidating leading international datasets, WMO noted that the difference in temperature between the warmest years is only a few hundredths of a degree – less than the margin of uncertainty.

Average global air temperatures over land and sea surface in 2014 were 0.57 °C (1.03°F) above the long-term average of 14.00°C (57.2 °F) for the 1961-1990 reference period. By comparison, temperatures were 0.55 °C (1.00°F) above average in 2010 and 0.54°C (0.98°F) above average in 2005,  according to WMO calculations. The estimated margin of uncertainty was 0.10°C (0.18°F).

“The overall warming trend is more important than the ranking of an individual year,” said WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud. “Analysis of the datasets indicates that 2014 was nominally the warmest on record, although there is very little difference between the three hottest years,” said Mr Jarraud.

“Fourteen of the fifteen hottest years have all been this century. We expect global warming to continue, given that rising levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the increasing heat content of the oceans are committing us to a warmer future,” he said. Around 93% of the excess energy trapped in the atmosphere by greenhouse gases from fossil fuels and other human activities ends up in the oceans. Therefore, the heat content of the oceans is key to understanding the climate system. Global sea-surface temperatures reached record levels in 2014.[1]

It is notable that the high 2014 temperatures occurred in the absence of a fully developed El Niño. El Niño occurs when warmer than average sea-surface temperatures in the eastern tropical Pacific combine, in a self-reinforcing loop, with atmospheric pressure systems. This has an overall warming impact on the climate. High temperatures in 1998 – the hottest year before the 21st century – occurred during a strong El-Niño year....

Graph from the WMO website

Ebola - is culture the real killer?

An opinion piece by Obinna Anyadike, Editor-at-Large, in IRIN: “African culture” – cute if you’re a tourist, catastrophic when you want to put a lid on Ebola, or so some international health experts and media coverage of the outbreak would have us believe.

Why do people persist with risky funeral rites, eat Ebola-harbouring bushmeat, and occasionally attack the very health workers sent to help, the news reports leave us wondering. What is the value of “traditional beliefs” when they are harmful: why can’t people just act more rationally?

The simple answer is; ask the communities. The growing number of researchers that do, find that people are acting as responsibly as they can in desperate circumstances. The lack of a properly functioning Ebola response and weak healthcare services has forced communities into rough and ready self-reliance. Faced with hotlines going unanswered, overcrowded Ebola Treatment Units (ETU), militarized quarantine areas, communities are actually looking for more information, not less.

“Communities will do the best they can given the resources they have, even if ‘un-cultural’, in moments of crisis in order to fight for a future,” a recent study exploring community responses in urban Liberia found. It noted community leaders want training so they can provide safe burials; young men are rallying to guard their neighborhoods against perceived threats; and some people, ill-advisedly, have improvised protection suits out of raincoats and plastic bags to nurse the sick....

Hospital in Kenema, Sierra Leone, where blood samples are tested for ebola, shot by Leasmhar, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

The White House: A new flood standard for federal investments will help communities weather climate change, extreme storms

John Podesta and Craig Fugate in the White House blog: When Hurricane Sandy hit New York City, the storm sent water cascading into the South Ferry subway station, pouring into the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, inundating neighborhoods from Staten Island to Queens. At Battery Park in lower Manhattan, water reached more than 9 feet above the average high-tide line.

One factor fueling the surge -- New York Harbor, where waters have risen about a foot since 1900. We know that rising sea levels, higher average temperatures, higher ocean temperatures, and other effects of climate change will make extreme weather events more frequent and more severe. And the climate is changing -- earlier this month, NASA and NOAA announced that 2014 was the hottest year on record globally, meaning that 14 of the 15 hottest years in recorded history have happened this century.

That’s why when we invested billions to help communities rebuild from Sandy, we also committed to “build back better” -- to rebuild infrastructure to a higher standard so it can withstand the increased risks posed by sea level rise and other climate impacts.

Today, the White House is building on that experience by releasing a new flood risk management standard for new and rebuilt federally funded structures in and around floodplains. This new resilience standard will help ensure taxpayer dollars are well spent on infrastructure that can better withstand the impacts of flooding.

Agencies will have the flexibility to choose among different approaches to apply the resilience standard -- by using the best methods informed by the best available, actionable climate science; by building two or three feet, depending on how critical the structure is, above the 100-year flood level; or by building above the 500-year flood level.

...The standard announced today leverages the experience gained through the Hurricane Sandy recovery and closely tracks flood elevation requirements already adopted in at least 350 jurisdictions across the country. It does not alter flood standards for levees and will not affect the standards or rates of the National Flood Insurance Program. On behalf of the federal government, FEMA will solicit public input prior to the implementation of the new standard for 60 days online and through a series of public meetings in flood-prone areas around the country....

Hurrcane Sandy damage to the New Jersey coast, US Air Force photo

Asia’s cities poised to lead in climate change adaptation

Toral Patel at Asia Foundation:
With support from the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities challenge, a number of cities across Asia are beginning to confront the impacts of climate change. Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, recently selected as one of Resilient Cities’ newest member cities and home to 1.5 million people, is one. Due to its low elevation and proximity to the Mekong River, Phnom Penh is highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, particularly heavy monsoons rains which can create disruptive urban flooding, while changes in precipitation patterns and increasing saltwater intrusion adversely affect the city’s water supply and coastal ecosystems.

Due to its low elevation and proximity to the Mekong River, Phnom Penh is highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, particularly heavy monsoons rains which can create disruptive urban flooding. Photo/Flicker user Chun Yip So

Proximity to rivers and coastlines increases exposure to climate-induced hazards in many mega-cities like Bangkok, Dhaka, Ho Chi Minh City, and Manila. Exposure alone, however, is not what makes these and other Asian cities vulnerable. Rather, it is their low capacity to adapt to new and existing hazards...

Phnom Penh in the evening, shot byMilei.vencel, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license 

After intense flooding, Malawi desperately needs scale-up in international aid – UN experts

UN News Centre: The international community must rapidly respond to the devastating flooding affecting Malawi with critical humanitarian aid and appropriate funding, a group of United Nations human rights experts affirmed today, warning that the African country was facing “its worst flooding in living memory.”

In a press release, the Special Rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons, Chaloka Beyani, the Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Hilal Elver, and the Special Rapporteur on the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation, Léo Heller, encouraged the international community to do “everything possible to meet the current serious shortfall in funds and provision of essential aid,” especially as only a quarter of the urgently required $81 million of a Preliminary Response Plan had been received to date.

“The flooding has displaced large numbers of people and presents massive and complex challenges for Governments and their humanitarian allies in the short, medium and longer-term,” Mr. Beyani said.

“Evacuation of affected populations should be undertaken where necessary to save lives, and an effective humanitarian response is essential to address the needs of internally displaced people and others affected,” he continued. “Helping people to return and reconstruct devastated homes - when circumstances allow - will be just one challenge among many to rebuild lives and livelihoods and should be part of a broader recovery plan.”

Malawi is regularly hit by floods and droughts, requiring emergency responses of varying size each year. This year, flooding has caused displacement of over 170,000 people, while an estimated 116,000 households have lost their crops and livestock. In Nsanje district alone, 79 people are confirmed dead with another 153 people still missing...

Basket Bridge, Rumphi, northern Malawi, crossing South Rukuru river, shot by Michaelphoya, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International 4.0 license

Egypt's Al-Sisi and Ethiopia’s Prime Minister agree on further Renaissance Dam coordination

The Daily News (Egypt): President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi said Egypt does not oppose Ethiopia’s right to development through implementation of projects on the River Nile, in a Thursday meeting with Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn. Al-Sisi added, however, that there should be consideration of Egypt’s water rights, particularly as the river Nile constitutes the only source of the country’s water needs.

The meeting came on the sidelines of the 24th Ordinary Session of the Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the African Union (AU) in Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. Al-Sisi and Desalgen agreed that the solution for the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) issue will be coordinated through a joint commission, according to an official presidential statement by spokesperson.

During his short visit, Al-Sisi also held several bilateral meetings with the presidents of Tunisa, Tunisia, Uganda, Djibouti, South Sudan and the prime minister of Sweden, amongst others.

...The GERD has been an issue of contention and tripartite talks between Ethiopia, Egypt, and Sudan. The latter two nations have expressed concern over the potential impact the hydroelectric dam could have on their share of vital River Nile water.

The foreign ministers of Egypt and Ethiopia expressed in November mutual recognition for the water rights of each other’s nations following the fifth session of the Egyptian-Ethiopian joint committee in Addis Ababa. ...

The Nile in Sudan, viewed by NASA

Expensive water plants won’t quench thirst in Pakistan’s Thar desert

Zofeen T. Ebrahim in Eco-Business: In early January former president and co-chairperson of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), Asif Ali Zardari, inaugurated what is touted to be one of Asia’s largest reverse osmosis water purification plants in Mithi city in Tharparkar district, Sindh province.

This is just one of 750 plants in the pipeline, which the Sindh government – run by the PPP – claims will bring drinking water to the drought prone region. But experts say the expensive technology is inappropriate for dispersed local communities and building canals and rain ponds would provide a more reliable stream of water in the long run.

Tharparkar lies in the south-east of Sindh province. With a population of about 1.2 million, it is one of the poorest of Pakistan’s 120 districts, with the lowest Human Development Index. People live in harsh conditions where even the smallest weather aberration can have huge repercussions. Last year, the 30 per cent less than average rainfall led to over 600 deaths, including infants, mostly due to malnutrition. The region, bordering the Indian states of Rajasthan and Gujarat has been facing drought for the third consecutive year.

...All this provides good political sound bites but these reverse osmosis (RO) plants are not really the answer to the region’s water proble
ms say experts. First, the plants do not have the capacity to supply sufficient water to the local population. At a newly government-installed RO plant in the village of Fangrio, also in Tharparkar, three dozen or so people including men women and children were seen bickering and fighting over the limited waster produced by the plant.

The plant does not provide nearly enough water for the village of 500 households. ...The plants are also costly and difficult to maintain. ...[T]he community has not been given sufficient training to operate and maintain these plants, although company representative Burney claims the water plants have generated local employment opportunities.  The plants also consume large amounts of energy , something which is also in short supply....

In the Thar desert, shot by Valentina Pierantonio, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license

NASA launches groundbreaking soil moisture Mapper

A press release from NASA: The Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) observatory, a mission with broad applications for science and society, lifted off at 6:22 a.m. PST (9:22 a.m. EST) Saturday from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, on a United Launch Alliance Delta II rocket. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, manages SMAP for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, with instrument hardware and science contributions made by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

...SMAP now begins a three-year mission that will figuratively scratch below Earth's surface to expand our understanding of a key component of the Earth system that links the water, energy and carbon cycles driving our living planet. SMAP's combined radar and radiometer instruments will peer into the top 2 inches (5 centimeters) of soil, through clouds and moderate vegetation cover, day and night, to produce the highest-resolution, most accurate soil moisture maps ever obtained from space.

The mission will help improve climate and weather forecasts and allow scientists to monitor droughts and better predict flooding caused by severe rainfall or snowmelt -- information that can save lives and property. In addition, since plant growth depends on the amount of water in the soil, SMAP data will allow nations to better forecast crop yields and assist in global famine early-warning systems.

"The launch of SMAP completes an ambitious 11-month period for NASA that has seen the launch of five new Earth-observing space missions to help us better understand our changing planet," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. "Scientists and policymakers will use SMAP data to track water movement around our planet and make more informed decisions in critical areas like agriculture and water resources."....

NASA's Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) observatory lifts off from Space Launch Complex 2 West at California's Vandenberg Air Force Base, beginning a three-year mission to map Earth's vital moisture hidden in the soils beneath our feet. Image credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls 

Include genes in climate change plans, urges FAO

Jan Piotrowski in SciDev.net: The UN is mooting the inclusion of genetic resources in guidelines for national climate change adaptation plans to support food security in developing countries.  Guidelines adopted this month by the Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture within the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) set out step-by-step advice for safeguarding a healthy gene pool. This includes ensuring access to a wide variety of plant, animal and microbe species through seed banks, environmental protection programmes and research.

The guidelines chime with advice from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which helps countries create national adaptation plans. But according to an FAO statement, it remains to be seen whether the FAO’s guidelines will become an official part of the UNFCCC guidelines on national adaptation plans. The FAO commission is pushing for this to happen, it said in its statement.

Similar guidelines already exist for health and water issues, so it is time that genetic resources are acknowledged in the adaptation process, says Linda Collette, the secretary of the Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture.

“People do not realise the importance of genetic resources in the climate change debate,” she says. “Having the right seeds and breeds is absolutely essential for climate change adaptation.”...

A baobab in Zimbabwe split open to show the seeds, shot by JackyR, Wikimedia Commons, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Much aid, little long-term impact in Democratic Republic of Congo

IRIN: Aid agencies have sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into eastern Democratic Republic of Congo in the past two decades. But seeing little long-term impact or prospect of stability, some are now calling for an overhaul of the way aid is delivered in the long-troubled region.

Eastern DRC has been plagued by war and instability since 1994, when thousands of ethnic Hutus, including soldiers and militias responsible for the Rwandan genocide, poured over the border from Rwanda. Conflicts over land and resources have displaced millions of Congolese, many of them repeatedly.

The UN says there were about 2.7 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) in DRC in 2014, the majority of them in the east. Aid workers are also bracing for an expected military offensive by UN and government forces against a long-standing rebel group in North Kivu that will likely prompt tens of thousands more impoverished Congolese to flee their homes.

The calls for change come just as officials in DRC’s North Kivu province press for the closure of IDP camps, and as donors cut back funding for a region whose intractable problems have been overshadowed by newer crises, from the war in Syria to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

...The three-year NRC project, funded bythe British government, is one of several initiatives seeking better understanding of how people experience and adapt to displacement. The research should help make aid groups more effective in helping both IDPs and host communities rebound from shocks.

Other humanitarian groups have similarly begun searching for ways to help entire communities better deal with the endless waves of violence and displacement, even as they scramble to keep the immediate victims alive....

A 2008 Danish aid delivery to Democratic Republic of Congo, shot by Julien Harneis, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 1.0 Generic license. 

Strong storms to become stronger, weak storms to become weaker

A press release at the University of Toronto News: A study led by atmospheric physicists at the University of Toronto finds that global warming will not lead to an overall increasingly stormy atmosphere, a topic debated by scientists for decades. Instead, strong storms will become stronger while weak storms become weaker, and the cumulative result of the number of storms will remain unchanged.

“We know that with global warming we’ll get more evaporation of the oceans,” said Frédéric Laliberté, a research associate at U of T’s physics department and lead author of a study published this week in Science. “But circulation in the atmosphere is like a heat engine that requires fuel to do work, just like any combustion engine or a convection engine.”

The atmosphere’s work as a heat engine occurs when an air mass near the surface takes up water through evaporation as it is warmed by the sun and moves closer to the equator. The warmer the air mass is, the more water it takes up. As it reaches the equator, it begins to ascend through the atmosphere, eventually cooling as it radiates heat out into space. Cool air can hold less moisture than warm air, so as the air cools, condensation occurs, which releases heat.  When enough heat is released, air begins to rise even further, pulling more air behind it producing a thunderstorm. The ultimate “output” of this atmospheric engine is the amount of heat and moisture that is redistributed between the equator and the North and South Poles.

“By viewing the atmospheric circulation as a heat engine, we were able to rely on the laws of thermodynamics to analyze how the circulation would change in a simulation of global warming,” said Laliberté. “We used these laws to quantify how the increase in water vapour that would result from global warming would influence the strength of the atmospheric circulation.”

...The scientists concluded that the increase in water vapour was making the process less efficient by evaporating water into air that is not already saturated with water vapour. They showed that this inefficiency limited the strengthening of atmospheric circulation, though not in a uniform manner. Air masses that are able to reach the top of the atmosphere are strengthened, while those that cannot are weakened...

A thunderstorm over Ueterson, Germany, shot by Huhu Uet, Wikimedia Commons,  under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license 

Climate change responsible for super-charging winter storms, scientists say

Suzanne Goldenberg in the Guardian (UK): Winters may be getting shorter, but watch out when it does snow: climate change is super-charging storms like the blizzard engulfing the American north-east, scientists said on Monday.

The heavier storms of recent years – snowfalls that shut down cities and brought heavy flooding to coastal areas of New England – carried the imprints of climate change, as researchers get better at detecting the fingerprints of global warming – even from snow.

It was too soon to pin the current storm to climate change, but a trend line was emerging, the scientists said. “The snow season is getting shorter,” said Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. “But the interesting thing is you can end up with heavier snows in part because of climate change.”

In general, climate change produces more extreme precipitation in North America – and if it’s cold enough, that produces snow. ... Nor’easters pack their punch from the contrast between cold land temperatures at the warmer Gulf stream and surrounding waters. Five of New York’s biggest snow storms have occurred since 2000, and 2014 was the hottest year in 130 years of temperatures records.

...“You can easily get as much as 20% more snow out of a storm than you would otherwise, as long as it is cold enough so that all of that moisture gets converted into snow. And that is usually the case in the wintertime,” Trenberth said....

NASA image of the current visitor to Carbon Based headquarters, January 27, 2015

After ebola, what next for West Africa’s health systems

IRIN: As rates of Ebola infection fall in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, planning has begun on how to rebuild public health systems and learn lessons from the outbreak. Nobody is declaring victory yet. But in Sierra Leone, the worst-affected country, there were 117 new confirmed cases reported in the week to 18 January, the latest statistics available, compared with 184 the previous week and 248 the week before that. Guinea halved its cases in the week to 18 January – down to 20 – and Liberia held steady at eight.

The epidemic is not over until there are zero cases over two incubation periods – the equivalent of 42 days. “It’s like being only a little bit pregnant – there’s no such thing as a little Ebola. We have to get to zero, there can be no reservoirs of Ebola,”  Margaret Harris, spokesperson of the World Health Organization (WHO), told IRIN.

But after 21,724 cases and 8,641 deaths in nine countries since the epidemic began in Guinea last year, there is some light. And health workers are already starting to look at what’s next. “Right now important meetings are going on in each country to work out what needs to be done to rebuild - in some significant respects to build health systems almost anew - and to build back better,” said Harris.

A European Union donor conference isdue at the beginning of March in Brussels. “What we want to see as a country is a resilient health system that can withstand shocks,” Liberia’s Assistant Health Minister Tolbert Nyenswah told IRIN. “Our plan [to be presented in Brussels] will be finalized by the end of February. It will be well costed with tangible goals.”

Ebola tested the public health systems in the three West African countries to near destruction – most places in the world would have also struggled. But where the three failed was at the basic “nitty-gritty” level of “standard surveillance, testing and monitoring, the containment of cases, the bread and butter of public health”, said Adia Benton, a social anthropologist at Brown University in Rhode Island....

Ebola training in Guinea, shot by CDC Global CDC Global, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License

Satellites for peat's sake

A press release from the European Space Agency: Satellites can help us to safeguard nature’s richest carbon storehouses – peatlands. Peatlands make up just 3% of land but capture twice as much carbon as all forests combined. They are also an important source of drinking water and provide a home to many rare and threatened animals and plants.

Ecosystems work best when left intact but these wetland areas are being threatened by human exploitation, resulting in vast carbon emissions, frequent and uncontrollable fires and loss of valuable landscapes.

 Rezatec in Oxfordshire, UK, supported by ESA’s Integrated Applications Promotions programme, in the Peat spotter project will give landowners an easier and cheaper way of calculating the potential economic value of conserving or restoring their peatlands and monitoring the results of their investment.

“Peat spotter helps landowners to manage their peat resource more sustainably through mapping the area, measuring the carbon it contains and monitoring how its integrity is changing over time,” says Patrick Newton, CEO of Rezatec.

To do this, satellite imagery is used to locate and create initial mappings of peatlands. This information is enriched with ground data collected by field agents using handheld devices. An app prompts users in the field for measurements, satnav adds location information, and the data are then sent directly to a centralised office via satcom for analysis. The new approach is a cost-effective way of measuring peat extent and how intact it is over wide and potentially remote areas that are otherwise expensive to measure or inaccessible from the ground....

A peat deposit in Hanhisuo, Finland, shot by Ohikulkija, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Vitter: Obama's Climate agenda threatens flood insurance prices for Louisianians

We can expect to see more of this. From Insurance News Net: Today, Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), Chairman of the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Committee, sent a letter to President Barack Obama, regarding the Administration's recent efforts to develop expansive new federal floodplain management standards based on preconceptions in the President's Climate Action Plan. The Obama standards could drastically change floodplain maps, which would inevitably affect flood insurance rates.

"Before President Obama begins to meddle with floodplain standards, we need an open dialogue with those directly impacted by flooding and infrastructure development," said Vitter. "The worst part - the Administration's plans could unnecessarily drive up flood insurance rates on small businesses and others across Louisiana who rely on affordable flood insurance, as well as increase the costs to other funded infrastructure projects."

Vitter has extensively fought to lower flood insurance prices. Last year, Vitter helped pass a flood insurance fix bill to protect against unaffordable rate increases. He's also been working to get the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to reduce administrative costs of the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) and to increase participation in the program. According to the NFIB, nearly 40% of small businesses remain closed following a flooding disaster.

Last year, Vitter led efforts to pass the Water Resources and Reform Development Act (WRRDA) into law. As the lead Senate Republican on the conference committee who negotiated the final legislation, Vitter ensured that the bill included improved funding mechanisms to assist with flood control. In recent years, Vitter has also secured funding for flood control measures in Louisiana, enabling local officials to make key infrastructure improvements to better protect Louisianians....

Image from a 1973 flood in Pierre Part, Louisiana. National Archives photo

Wiggles: Inconsistencies undermine model reliability for projecting decade-to-decade warming

Science 2.0: A new study finds that most climate models may have wiggles that undermine accuracy - but they are likely underestimating the degree of decade-to-decade variability occurring in mean surface temperatures as Earth's atmosphere warms.

The models also provide inconsistent explanations of why this variability occurs in the first place and such discrepancies undermine the models' reliability for projecting the short-term pace as well as the extent of future warming, the study's authors warn.  As such, we shouldn't over-interpret recent temperature trends, no matter what blizzard his New York City and leads to exploitation of climate science to generate media pageviews.

"The inconsistencies we found among the models are a reality check showing we may not know as much as we thought we did," said lead author Patrick T. Brown, a Ph.D. student in climatology at Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment. "This doesn't mean greenhouse gases aren't causing Earth's atmosphere to warm up in the long run. It just means the road to a warmer world may be bumpier and less predictable, with more decade-to-decade temperature wiggles than expected. If you're worried about climate change in 2100, don't over-interpret short-term trends. Don't assume that the reduced rate of global warming over the last 10 years foreshadows what the climate will be like in 50 or 100 years."

To conduct their study, they analyzed 34 climate models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its fifth and most recent assessment report, finalized last November.  The analysis found good consistency among the 34 models explaining the causes of year-to-year temperature wiggles, Brown noted. The inconsistencies existed only in terms of the model's ability to explain decade-to-decade variability, such as why global mean surface temperatures warmed quickly during the 1980s and 1990s, but have remained relatively stable since then....

Wrong kind of model -- Fashion Week in Budapest, shot from stylemagazin.hu, Wikimedia Commons

Going with the flow

A press release from the University of California-Santa Barbara: Millions of Americans live in flood-prone areas. In 2012 alone, the cost of direct flood damage hit nearly half a billion dollars. However, because the factors contributing to flood risk are not fully understood, river basin management — and even the calculation of flood insurance premiums — may be misguided.

A new study by UC Santa Barbara’s Michael Singer and colleagues presents a paradigm shift in flood hazard analysis that could change the way such risk is assessed in the future. The results are published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Existing analyses attribute flood hazard to how often high water flows occur. They don’t, however, take into account the ability of river channels to accommodate them. The researchers present a novel method that compares the effects of channel capacity and stream flow on flood hazard frequency. They also document how flood hazard has changed over time in more than 400 streams across the United States.

“Our results demonstrate that changes in river channel boundaries directly impact flood hazard trends across the U.S.,” said Singer, an associate researcher at UCSB’s Earth Research Institute. “We show that in order to accurately calculate flood hazard and insurance premiums for river basins, channel capacity needs to be considered jointly with stream flow.”

...The findings revealed that important trends in channel morphology through time were three times more common than those related to water quantity, indicating that changes in the channel’s geometry tend to offset increases in water flow. “That raised alarm bells,” Singer said. “It suggests that a lot of areas that we might not have considered to have trends in flood risk actually do.”...

Red represents increases and blue decreases in flood hazard frequency. Deeper colors indicate sites with statistically significant trends. Image from the UC Santa Barbara website

Climate change influences the quality of life for Kenyan women

Dr, Fibian Lukalo in AllAfrica.com via the Star (Kenya):
...According to the United Nations Population Fund, women in sub-Saharan Africa walk an average of 6km each day to collect water. Many times this water is not even safe for drinking and places a heavy burden on these women. Water weighs 3.6kg per gallon [A litre of water weighs 1kg, hence a 5litre container means 5kg].

Women risk a lot, physically, emotionally and mentally to carry back to their families (on their backs) life itself! The situation is dire for pregnant women who risk premature births, prolapsed uterus, back injuries and lower reproductive tract infections.

This female connection to water goes way beyond the symbolism found in history, religion, cultural practices and norms, literature and legend. Some examples include the foundation of Timbuktu (Mali), Mami Wata (West Africa), and the legend of the Red Bull (South Africa). Women are affected to a much greater degree by climate change and the socioeconomic and environmental disasters it brings.

Here in Kenya, the vicious nature of water seeking to follow its course will be witnessed by the flooding to occur in Budalangi, Nyando, Kano plains, Athi plains, Ewaso Nyiro basin and parts of all major cities. In regard to saving the lives of women in the 47 counties, can we as a nation have a county water meter?

...For all the mothers living in flood plains, this rainy season you will be experience a decline in supplies of quality water sources and food [grown on land]. Other declines will include low supplies of dry firewood, an increase in poverty, low nutritional levels, poor sanitation, susceptibility to physical injuries, increase in water-based vector diseases, cholera, malaria infections, lowering educational standards, scarcity in food supply, employment and income opportunities....

Children carrying a jerry can of water in Wajir, Kenya, photo by Oxfam East Africa Oxfam East Africa, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Greenland Ice: The warmer it gets the faster it melts

Space Daily via SPX: Melting of glacial ice will probably raise sea level around the globe, but how fast this melting will happen is uncertain. In the case of the Greenland Ice Sheet, the more temperatures increase, the faster the ice will melt, according to computer model experiments by Penn State geoscientists.

"Although lots of people have thought about sea level rise from the ice sheets, we don't really know how fast that will happen," said Patrick Applegate, research associate, Penn State's Earth and Environmental Systems Institute.

If all the ice in the Greenland Ice Sheet melts, global sea level would rise by about 24 feet. In the last 100 years, sea level in the New York City area has only increased by about one foot. However, storm surges from hurricanes stack on top of this long-term increase, so sea level rise will allow future hurricanes to flood places where people are not ready for or used to flooding. A vivid example occurred during Hurricane Sandy when parts of the New York City subway tunnel system flooded.

Greenland might be especially vulnerable to melting because that area of the Earth sees about 50 percent more warming than the global average. Arctic sea ice, when it exists, reflects the sun's energy back through the atmosphere, but when the sea ice melts and there is open water, the water absorbs the sun's energy and reradiates it back into the air as heat.

Arctic sea ice coverage has decreased over the last few decades, and that decrease will probably continue in the future, leading to accelerated temperature rise over Greenland. Floating ice does not add to sea level, but the Greenland Ice Sheet rests on bedrock that is above sea level.

Feedbacks in the climate system cause accelerated temperature rise over the Arctic. Other feedbacks in the Greenland Ice Sheet that contribute to melting include height-melting feedback. A warm year in Greenland causes more melt around the edges of the ice sheet, lowering the surface. The atmosphere is warmer at lower altitudes, so the now lower surface experiences even more melting. This process can lead to accelerated ice melt and sea level rise....

A glacier seen from offshore near Amassalik, Greenland, shot by Christine Zenino Christine Zenino ,Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Indigenous people measure carbon that satellites miss

Bjorn Carey in Futurity via Stanford University: Indigenous people govern about half of all remaining undeveloped land on the planet. New research with indigenous people in the Amazon suggests they may outperform satellites in measuring the true carbon storage potential of the rainforest. That finding could influence how indigenous people in Guyana and elsewhere manage their forests and may lead to greater opportunities for these communities to engage in carbon offset programs.

The project, described in the journal Forest Ecology and Management, grew out of efforts to engage indigenous peoples to gain better understanding of ecosystems that have been relatively undisturbed by modern civilization. ...“The people know the trails really well, and some of them will walk two days to get to their plot and make measurements,” Fragoso says. “They can make really good measurements in really isolated areas, where government workers would never get to. Generally, professional scientists will not travel these distances on foot to verify carbon estimates.”

While satellite observations would most likely identify each of these plots as “forest” and assigned them a standardized value for carbon storage, the field workers identified 11 habitat types with trees, each of which requires a different set of calculations for determining its carbon storage potential. Because they could be more specific about the biomass of each vegetation type making up a plot, they were able to calculate that forests in Guyana contain 20 to 40 percent more carbon than previously estimated.

...These areas probably play a much larger role in the global climate than previously assumed, Fragoso says, and indigenous people need to be better represented at global climate talks. These land-owners have more carbon storage at their disposal to sell as carbon credits to governments and corporations looking to offset their greenhouse gas-producing activities.

...This is the first model for turning indigenous people into field researchers capable of producing scientifically rigorous calculations for carbon, says Fragoso, who is now planning to share the concept with other indigenous nations around the world.

Rainforest in Guyana, shot by Loriski, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license