2014 SkS Weekly News Roundup #9A

Acidic waters kill 10 million Scallops off Vancouver
Climate change 'very evident,' so let's deal with it
Could Britain manage floods like the Dutch
Debunking Charles Krauthammer’s climate lies
Global warming slowdown 'does not invalidate climate change'
Global warming won't cut winter deaths as hoped
No global warming 'hiatus' for extreme heat days
Obama to propose shift in wildfire funding
Study links temperature to a Peruvian glacier’s growth and retreat
Sun-dimming volcanoes partly explain global warming hiatus
Unfrozen caveman pundit debates climate change
World begins 2014 with unusual number of extreme weather events

Acidic waters kill 10 million Scallops off Vancouver

A mass die-off of scallops near Qualicum Beach on Vancouver Island is being linked to the increasingly acidic waters that are threatening marine life and aquatic industries along the West Coast.

Rob Saunders, CEO of Island Scallops, estimates his company has lost three years worth of scallops and $10 million dollars — forcing him to lay off approximately one-third of his staff.

“I’m not sure we are going to stay alive and I’m not sure the oyster industry is going to stay alive,” Saunders told The Parksville Qualicum Beach NEWS. “It’s that dramatic.”

Climate Change 'Very Evident,' So Let's Deal With It, World Panel Says

The next report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an international group of scientists and government policymakers, will focus on managing the risks of a warming planet, according to the report's co-chair.

"The impacts of climate change that have already occurred are very evident, they're widespread, they have consequences," Chris Field, a professor in the Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University and the co-chair of the IPCC working group drafting the report, said in a meeting with reporters Monday.

The fifth assessment report from the IPCC's Working Group II focuses on climate impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability. The final version of the report is due to be released on March 31, though reporters have already published a leaked early draft. The draft states that, within this century, effects of climate change "will slow down economic growth and poverty reduction, further erode food security and trigger new poverty traps."

Could Britain manage floods like the Dutch?

Just like the British in 2014, the Dutch have experienced serious inland flooding in the post-war period, including in 1953 when there were around 2,000 casualties. Moreover, in 1993 and 1995, river floods damaged more than 10,000 houses and companies, and some 250,000 people were evacuated.

The disturbing news is that the British floods are part of a much bigger picture of growing flood risk across the globe. The United Nations, for instance, has calculated that in 2012 the world reached a tipping point where more than half of the global population now lives in flood-prone areas.

Debunking Charles Krauthammer’s climate lies

Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer published a head slapper of a column last week, in which the conservative pundit managed to spew an enormous number of misinformed, misleading claims, all couched in this “disclaimer” of an opening graf:

The column already received a deserved takedown in the Post’s own Op-Ed pages, courtesy of his colleague Stephen Stromberg. The same day it was published, coincidentally, protesters with CREDO and Forecast the Facts delivered a petition to the Post’s D.C. offices demanding that the paper stop publishing Op-Eds that spread misinformation about the science of climate change.

Global warming slowdown 'does not invalidate climate change'

The slowdown in rising global surface temperatures is not a sign that climate change is no longer happening, the national science academies of the US and the UK have said.

Publishing a guide on the state of climate change science, the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society said the short-term slowdown this century did not "invalidate" the long-term trend of rising temperatures caused by man-made climate change.

"Despite the decadal slowdown in the rise of average surface temperature, a longer-term warming trend is still evident. Each of the last three decades was warmer than any other decade since widespread thermometer measurements were introduced in the 1850s," the publication, Climate Change Evidence and Causes, said.

Global warming won't cut winter deaths as hoped

Global warming will fail to reduce high winter death rates as some officials have predicted because there will be more harmful weather extremes even as it gets less cold, a British study showed on Sunday.

No global warming 'hiatus' for extreme heat days

The number and intensity of extremely hot days has been increasing steadily despite a "pause" in the rise of average surface temperatures over the past 15 years, a new study has found.

"This analysis shows that not only is there no pause in the evolution of the warmest daily extremes over land but that they have continued unabated over the observational record," said the paper published Wednesday in Nature Climate Change.

"Furthermore, the available evidence suggests that the most 'extreme' extremes show the greatest change."

Obama to propose shift in wildfire funding

President Obama’s annual budget request to Congress will propose a significant change in how the government pays to fight wildfires, administration officials said, a move that they say reflects the ways in which climate change is increasing the risk for and cost of those fires.

The wildfire funding shift is one in a series of recent White House actions related to climate change as Mr. Obama tries to highlight the issue and build political support for his administration’s more muscular policies, like curbing carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants. On Monday, Mr. Obama plans to describe his proposal at a meeting in Washington with governors of Western states that have been ravaged recently by severe drought and wildfires.

Study links temperature to a Peruvian glacier’s growth and retreat

Sitting on a flat volcanic plain 18,000 feet above sea level, the great Quelccaya ice cap of Peru is the largest piece of ice in the tropics. In recent decades, as scientists have watched it melt at an accelerating pace, it has also become a powerful symbol of global warming.

Yet the idea that the ice cap has retreated over time because of a change in temperature, rather than other possible factors like reduced snowfall, has always been more of a surmise than a proven case. In fact, how to interpret the disappearance of glaciers throughout the tropics has been a scientific controversy.

Now, a group of scientists is presenting new findings suggesting that over the centuries, temperature is the main factor controlling the growth and retreat of the largest glacier emerging from the ice cap. If they are right, then Quelccaya’s recent melting could indeed be viewed as a symbol of the planetary warming linked to human emissions of greenhouse gases.

Sun-dimming volcanoes partly explain global warming hiatus

Small volcanic eruptions help explain a hiatus in global warming this century by dimming sunlight and offsetting a rise in emissions of heat-trapping gases to record highs, a study showed on Sunday.

Eruptions of at least 17 volcanoes since 2000, including Nabro in Eritrea, Kasatochi in Alaska and Merapi in Indonesia, ejected sulphur whose sun-blocking effect had been largely ignored until now by climate scientists, it said.

Unfrozen caveman pundit debates climate change

Climate change has a strange way of making people say ridiculous things. There’s the crowd that hoots “Where’s your global warming now?” every time there’s a cold snap or a blizzard in their home town—as if local weather were the same as global climate. There’s the faction that continues to insist that climate change is an elaborate hoax, one that’s enabled by a “bought-off media,” without ever specifying a) who’s doing the buying off and, b) exactly where I should have been going all these years to pick up my check.

And then there are the people who have way too much intellectual octane to be ridiculous, but they don’t mind getting the facts tactically wrong. Which brings us to Charles Krauthammer—specifically to the column he wrote in the Feb. 20 Washington Post. The headline—“The Myth of ‘Settled Science’”—portended bad things. But the opening sentences gave me hope.

World begins 2014 with unusual number of extreme weather events

There have been heatwaves in Slovenia and Australia, snow in Vietnam and the return of the polar vortex to North America. Britain has had its wettest winter in 250 years but temperatures in parts of Russia and the Arctic have been 10C above normal. Meanwhile, the southern hemisphere has had the warmest start to a year ever recorded, with millions of people sweltering in Brazilian and southern African cities.