Climate and Oceans

I was checking out some geology related videos on YouTube and came across these awesome time lapse videos of a glacier moving on Mont Blanc, captured from beneath the glacier itself. The glacier’s movement is measured with a modified tool that looks similar to a bike wheel on a spring. The video is from an episode of NOVA that aired on February 10, 2004.

Another video from the same NOVA episode showing what the movement looks like on top of the Mont Blanc glacier is below.

And lastly, here is this time lapse recorded from June to October 2004 of the Columbia Glacier in Alaska.

Currently, Hurricane Gustav is approaching the Gulf of Mexico and the current projections show that Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas are potentially threatened.

Exactly three years ago, Hurricane Katrina made landfall near New Orleans, Louisiana.

We wrote about the threat to New Orleans and immediate aftermath.

Here’s to hoping that New Orleans and the surrounding areas are spared from significant damage (and any area really).

Let’s hope the government’s response this time is quicker and more efficient. Best of luck to those in harm’s way.

I’m going to summarize two global warming and climate change studies that were published today.

Ice cores reveal fluctuations in the Earth’s greenhouse gases
A core drilled through 3 kilometers of ice in the middle of Antarctica has returned CO₂ (carbon dioxide), CH₄ (methane) and O₂ (oxygen) stretching back 800,000 years. Temperature curves (implied based on the ratio of O₂ isotopes) mostly show a close correlation between the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere and the relative temperature.

“The temperature curve over the past 800,000 years matches the CO2 curve beautifully – during glacial periods in which the climate is cold, there is less CO2 in the atmosphere,” says Professor Thomas Blunier from the Centre for Ice and Climate at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen. He explains that when it is cold there is less plant growth, and so there are fewer plants to absorb the CO2 from the air, while more CO2 is absorbed in the oceans, so the final calculation is a low CO2 content in the atmosphere during glacial periods. This produces a lower greenhouse effect, and leads to an even colder climate.

However, the new results show that during the glacial period that occurred between 650,000 and 750,000 years ago, the CO2 level was extremely low – lower than any previous measurements have indicated. It happened twice in this period, while the temperature was not lower than during other glacial periods.

Warming climate is changing life on global scale
A NASA study suggests that human induced climate change is impacting ecosystems and habitats at a large scale. The study looked at physical and biological impacts going back to 1970 and compared them to rising temperatures over that time frame.

Observed impacts included changes to physical systems, such as glaciers shrinking, permafrost melting, and lakes and rivers warming. Biological systems also were impacted in a variety of ways, such as leaves unfolding and flowers blooming earlier in the spring, birds arriving earlier during migration periods, and plant and animal species moving toward Earth’s poles and higher in elevation. In aquatic environments such as oceans, lakes, and rivers, plankton and fish are shifting from cold-adapted to warm-adapted communities.

The team conducted a “joint attribution” study. They showed that at the global scale, about 90 percent of observed changes in diverse physical and biological systems are consistent with warming. Other driving forces, such as land use change from forest to agriculture, were ruled out as having significant influence on the observed impacts.

Arguably Earth’s most dire resource, but only recently receiving any major discussion, is water. As a previous post pointed out the American Southwest is projected to become a drier climate while funding for monitoring and mitigation continues to decrease.

Over the past few years the plight of the Southeast has received a fair bit of press, but overshadowed by Atlanta’s water woes is the brilliance of Clayton County. In the 1980’s the Clayton County Water Authority built a series of wetlands to replace the last step of the water reclamation process. Water entering the sewers continue on to the reclamation facility and pass through the standard filtration systems designed to remove large debris, sediment and any other solids. The purification process is completed by feeding the water into their wetland systems where organisms, from single-celled bacteria to water lilies, do the rest. After the water is gravity-fed through a series of four wetland pools, the water enters their reservoir and is available for reuse. According to a recent story on NPR, of the 26 million gallons used a day in Clayton County, the wetland reclamation process returns 10 million gallons of potable water for future use. Not only are they getting 40% of their water back but the wetlands have created 4,000 acres of green space.

Source: Clayton County Water Authority.

Constructed wetlands are proving to be more efficient, more cost effective, and more environmentally sensitive than comparable secondary treatment methods. The wetlands allow the CCWA to increase its wastewater treatment capacity, while dropping the costs incurred in the process. The cost to build wastewater facilities using constructed wetlands is $4.73 a gallon, compared to nearly $10 a gallon using the more conventional methods.

The Authority’s LAS fields and constructed wetlands are included among the over 4,000 acres of protected green space that will never fall prey to residential or commercial development. This acreage provides for hearty forests and wildlife, not to mention incredible recreational opportunities located in such a close proximity to a major metropolitan city.

In addition to money saved, there have been no complaints about odor and unlike neighboring Atlanta, the residents of Clayton County were never in danger of running out of water during the recent drought.

A new study released by the A.M. Obukhov Institute of Atmospheric Physics RAS, in Moscow, Russia claims that human generated emissions of greenhouse gases (such as CO₂) are irrelevant to climate change.

The press release is rather light on details, however a PDF of the report can be found here.

The link between the carbon cycle, and human effects caused by emissions, energy use and agriculture, may only be relevant for the next ’several centuries,’ suggest Igor Mokhov and Alexey Eliseev from the A.M. Obukhov Institute of Atmospheric Physics RAS, in Moscow, Russia. The authors used a climate model known as IAP RAS CM to study how feedback between our climate and the carbon cycle changes over time. In their simulations, the authors assumed that fossil fuel emissions would grow exponentially with a characteristic timescale from 50 to 250years.

In their models, Mokhov and Eliseev found that although climate–carbon cycle feedback grows initially, it then peaks and eventually decreases to a point where the feedback ceases. If we succeed in slowing down the rate of emissions, the peak would be reached much later. However, a steep increase in emissions would bring the peak in coupling between climate and carbon emissions even closer.

The authors suggest that we are heading inexorably towards the saturation peak, irrespective of how quickly we get there: “Even weak but continuing emissions lead to eventual saturation of the climate–carbon cycle feedback,” Mokhov and Eliseev explain.

This one study goes counter to about 20 years worth of peer-reviewed research on the topic, so take it with a grain of salt. Of course, this is all that’s needed for opponents of alternative energies to rally behind.

[Via Eurekalert]