Climate: Extreme Greenland Ice Sheet melting episodes change runoff regime

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“When warm temperatures in 2012 caused an extreme melting episode across much of the Greenland Ice Sheet, it may have fundamentally altered the way the near-surface snow layers absorb water, according to a new study published in Nature Climate Change.
“The melting resulted in the formation of a thick layer of ice atop the previously porous surface. Subsequently, meltwater ran off the surface and to the ocean, with potential impacts on sea level, according to York University Professor William Colgan.
“Because the models scientists use to project Greenland’s sea level rise contribution do not presently take firn cap-off into consideration, it means that Greenland’s projected sea level rise due to meltwater runoff is likely higher than previously predicted. Getting this newly observed physical process into these models is an important next step for the team.”  from: summitcountyvoice.com

GR:  This helps explain the rapid formation of the cold pool of water in the North Atlantic (https://garryrogers.com/2015/03/24/whats-going-on-in-the-north-atlantic/).

 

Blogging for the Earth

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Blogging about Nature:  Introducing Garry Rogers on the League of Bloggers for a Better World

GarryRogers

Garry Rogers

My blog posts are about nature, about wildlife and its habitat (posts). They are expressions of my concerns for natural conditions and events.

During the past year, 2015, lethal heat waves and storms, decline of the great iconic species of elephants, lions, and rhinos, whittling away of the tropical rain forests, and massive clouds of air and water pollution made it clear that humanity is changing the Earth.

More than just the great species, we are eliminating many other species hundreds or perhaps thousands of times more quickly than ever achieved by meteorites, volcanic eruptions, or natural climate change.

Total extinction of a species usually happens after decades of decline.  In 2014, the World Wildlife Fund and other organizations carried out an exhaustive analysis of more than 10,000 wildlife studies (download the report).  They wanted to know how wild plants and animals were holding up against human activities. They learned that from 1970 to 2014, just 44 years, the total number of animals on Earth declined by more than 50%!  Rates of decline vary across species groups.  Birds, for instance declined by 40%.  Other groups, especially those dependent on freshwater, have declined by 70%.

What evolution took billions of years to produce, we humans are destroying in a tick of geologic time.  We are changing the planet so quickly, that not by migration, and certainly not by natural selection, can plants and animals cope. If we continue our activities at their current rate, in only a few centuries, we will turn the Earth into a factory farm of cities, farms, feedlots, and roads with only the tiniest fraction of our native creatures surviving on the fringes.

I often write brief comments without listing my sources. I am always happy to respond to requests for explanations.

 

Holistically-managed, grass-fed cows can save the planet! Neat video about how mimicking nature with grazing animals can not only reverse desertification, but also global warming.

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“Holistically-managed, grass-fed cows can save the planet! Neat video about how mimicking nature with grazing animals can not only reverse desertification, but also global warming. Grass-fed . . . ”

From: gardenchic.xyz

GR:  This is nonsense. We know that rotating livestock between two pastures gives each pasture time to recover during its rest period.  The idea was a sparkling innovation when the Romans applied it two thousand years ago. In fact, it was still in use in 1940 when my Range Management textbook was published. However, the idea was never sustainable.  The human population has continued to grow and we now have so many cattle that they are eating up the food needed by wildlife.  I don’t believe any us will claim that extinction of native wildlife is the way to “save the planet.”

“Garden Chic” doesn’t provide a link to the video, but I think it’s probably the phony old Ted Talk that got it’s author a lot of undeserved attention when he used the term “holistic.”  It is truly just BS.

A World in Hot Water sees Floods, Floods Everywhere

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“2015 was the hottest climate year in the global record by a long shot. According to Japan’s Meteorological Agency, temperatures were a full 0.18 degrees Celsius hotter than 1998, which is now the third hottest climate year on record, and a whopping 0.13 C above just last year (the second hottest year on record).

“It’s a part of a larger warming trend that began during the latter 19th Century. One that has now seen more than 1 degree Celsius of total overall global warming. And so, in a little more than one hundred and thirty years, humans through a massive burning of carbon based fuels, have forced the world to warm by about 20 percent of all the warming seen at the end of the last ice age. But at that great glacial termination it typically took about 2,000 years for the world to warm by the amount we’ve now seen over little more than a Century.”  from: robertscribbler.com

2015: Biodiversity’s Year Of Integration – Ecosystem Marketplace

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“Biodiversity and endangered habitat have always been difficult to finance, because their economic value isn’t as readily-apparent as that of water, air, and food.”  from: www.ecosystemmarketplace.com

GR:  There was progress in ecosystems protection in 2015, but it was overwhelmed by ecosystem destruction.  The fundamental problems of  human population expansion and continued global warming need our focus.

Growing demand for rice and palm oil ‘driving mangrove deforestation’

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“Over 100,000 hectares of forest cover lost in South-East Asia between 2000 and 2012, study finds.”  from: www.ibtimes.co.uk

GR:  This is why humans have to go.

 

Climate Change and El Nino Locked in Tempestuous Embrace — Teleconnection Between Hot Equatorial Pacific and North Atlantic Cool Pool?

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“The troubled and tempestuous North Atlantic. It’s a place where the most ominous kinds of atmospheric bombs just keep going off. From the Cumbria floods — the worst seen since at least the Middle Ages — to the 300-year-old bridge wrecking Frank, to above-freezing temperatures at the North Pole during Winter, weather features throughout this region have increasingly taken on the ugly markings of systems twisted by the hand of human-forced warming.

“One issue that’s been raised is what, if any, influence El Nino might have had on this most oddly extreme North Atlantic weather? There, such anomalous storms are more than likely the off-shoots of three new features related to climate change. One is a Stefan Ramhstorf-identified cool pool of water just south of Greenland. A freakish region of colder than normal sea surfaces that is, all-too-likely, the result of increased glacial melt outflows from a heat-harrowed Greenland. A second climate change related feature is a zone of very hot water along the Gulf Stream off the US East Coast. This odd warmth is likely due to a kind of Gulf Stream train wreck caused by the blocking lid of fresh water Greenland melt has thrown over that current’s driving circulation. So as the zone south of Greenland cools, the area just off the Eastern Seaboard heats up. A third and final feature is a polar warming related heating of the Barents sea surface along with a related massacre of sea ice in that previously frozen region.”  From: robertscribbler.com

GR:  Scribbler speculates that the strange connections that are forming will make weather forecasting difficult and unreliable.

Alberta must move away from oil-based economy, minister says

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EDMONTON — Climate isn’t all that’s changing in Alberta. The province’s NDP government has arguably made bigger moves on global warming in six months than the previous Conservatives made in a generation.  From: thechronicleherald.ca

Thank you Shannon Phillips.  Trudeau makes it all possible.

Great Basin rangeland facing challenges with climate change

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“Fighting the effects of climate change in Great Basin rangeland is drawing together federal, state and private interests to deal with what scientists say is greater weather variability causing big swings in forage available for cattle and wildlife.” More at www.idahostatesman.com.

(The photograph shows an impoverished cheatgrass landscape that native shrub vegetation occupied a century ago.)

GR:  Since people introduced cheatgrass to the region in the late 1800’s, the little weedy Asian grass has replaced native vegetation across millions of acres. A tremendous loss of natural productivity occurred as native plant and animal species declined.
Cheatgrass carries fire better than native plants. Fire frequency has increased, and native plants don’t have time to establish and mature before the next fire. Cheatgrass seeds survive the fires, and without competitors, the plant continues to increase.
For almost a century, range scientists have tried everything they can think of to control cheatgrass. They have failed, and it appears that the plant has become a permanent resident. There are only two reasonable management approaches now. First, remove domestic livestock so that the remaining native wildlife can survive on the impoverished cheatgrass ranges. And second, try to protect and preserve the few remaining areas with no cheatgrass.